


The Symptom

by Derin



Series: Parting the Clouds [25]
Category: Animorphs - Katherine A. Applegate
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-29
Updated: 2018-06-29
Packaged: 2019-05-30 07:15:42
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 17
Words: 25,324
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15091790
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Derin/pseuds/Derin
Summary: The ellimist is back, and he needs the Animorphs' help. An entire planet is in danger, and the fate of the residents comes down to a no-holds-barred fight to the death between two cosmic forces, each nominating eight champions to fight in their stead. On the one hand, the Animorphs have their own planet to defend and are kind of tired of being everyone else's regiment-for-hire; on the other, it's difficult to justify turning their backs on the fate of an entire planet of innocent people. But the biggest complication might not be the Animorphs themselves, but their eighth champion: Erek, who is completely incapable of fighting, insistent on going with them, and very obviously not telling them everything.If the Animorphs want to survive, they have to answer a lot of questions very quickly -- what's so important about this planet they've been sent to defend? How do you defeat a military force built by an evil god specifically to destroy everything in their path? What's the ellimist's game here; does he even want them to survive? Who is he?And what, really, is a chee?





	1. Chapter 1

 

“ _Hakuna matata… What a wonderful phrase…”_

I never really liked the Lion King, but when your school lets everyone out of class early to see a mini promotional show of the musical production at a special assembly, what are ya gonna do? Not go?

To be honest, I would’ve preferred being at home, catching up on some sleep. My head slipped sideways onto Rachel’s shoulder. Rachel had her eyes fixed on the stage, a dreamy look on her face. The boy on her other side, who had been trying to hold her hand for the whole performance, probably thought she was enjoying the show. I knew she was wondering which of his fingers to break.

Jake sat on my other side. He was grinning. This was probably because of Marco, who was sitting two rows in front of us, twitching his ears to the music. Even in the dim auditorium, it was easy to see those big llama ears move back and forth.

Wait a minute.

“Dammit,” I muttered. “This is a dream, isn’t it?”

“Yeah,” Jake said. “Sorry.”

“You’re not going to explode into a bunch of crushed fly parts or point out that Rachel’s being eaten alive by ants or anything, are you?”

“Do I usually do things like that?”

“I wouldn’t say it’s out of the ordinary. Look, don’t take this the wrong way, but I’m just going to go be alone for a bit, okay?”

“Okay, Cassie. Have fun.”

I inched my way between plastic seats, ignoring the complaints of people I blocked, until I reached the aisle. Then I stopped. And stared.

An old man was sitting in the audience, watching the show with apparent fascination. Nobody was paying him any attention, even though he was very distinctive-looking; he was a bright, glowing blue, with very long wispy hair and beard. His ears were large and swept upward into points, and while I had no doubt that he was looking at the play, it was impossible to tell that from looking at his eyes alone; they had no pupils, but were dark orbs full of stars.

He looked at me, smiled, and gestured to the empty seat next to him. I stepped back. I’d never dreamed of an ellimist before.

“I don’t really understand this story,” the ellimist admitted, turning his eyes back to the stage. “I have watched the movie multiple times, but it eludes me.”

“What’s going on?” I asked.

“I’d like to know that as well,” the ellimist said. “We have a classic tale of two brothers fighting for control of a civilisation, but the framing confuses me. The ‘good guy’ is happy to let citizen murder citizen, comfortable in the knowledge that his own social class protects him from harm, and even those at risk of being killed and eaten support this. This is justified as simply being the way things have to be; the ‘circle of life’. And yet hyenas – who, I might add, are in nature less likely to scavenge and steal from lions than lions are to scavenge and steal from them – are part of this circle of life, too, are they not? And yet they are left to starve, and the one leading a social revolution to bring them something as basic as the right to a meal is the ‘bad guy’.”

“Scar does betray the hyenas, though,” I pointed out.

“Eventually, yes. But he is framed as villainous long before that. He is framed this way for killing a ruler who used his privilege and apparent divine rights to oppress his people through murder and starvation in the name of his privilege-protecting religion. Historically, many of your people have been lauded as great heroes for doing exactly that. But what I truly don’t understand about this story is the draught. The ‘bad’ lion takes over, and nature itself punishes the entire country. There was no prior indication that lions had the ability to control the weather, and if nature is a conscious entity, are we supposed to approve of her decision to punish the legions of animals that had nothing whatsoever to do with the coup? See, here is the fascinating part of the story. That draught is a truly fascinating and inexplicable detail.”

“I think it’s just supposed to be symbolic of bad stuff happening,” I said, trying to keep up.

“Then why not show the bad things happening? Could they not think of any actual bad consequences of this coup, and had to invent weather control at the last minute?” He sat back. “See, this is what is truly fascinating about this particular story. The Lion King is a more modern retelling of Hamlet. Several of these points made sense in Hamlet, partly because the audience was not expected to so blatantly take sides in the overall fate of the country, as it is a much more focused tragedy. But mostly because it was written for a different time and a different people. Macbeth was written for an audience where the divine right of kings was assumed, yes? A king was the steward of his nation; to slay a king was an act of aggression against the land itself, rulership was in the blood, and as the land was an extension of the ruler, a usurper to the throne could indeed bring draught, war, famine and general bad fortune regardless of his actual actions. In the Lion King, a draught makes no sense whatsoever. In Hamlet, it does. But here is the crucial detail – the draught isn’t in Hamlet! They added it in for this adaptation, taking something that would have made sense in the original and putting it in a version where it doesn’t!” The ellimist shook its head. “Madness.”

“I think it’s just a story to entertain kids,” I said. “Teach them good morals and whatever.”

“Ah, yes. That our leaders rule by divine right and attempting to fight oppression will result in mass death and misery before you get torn apart by the very people you tried to rally. Good, modern morals. Of all the amazing things produced by this planet, the thing that baffles me the most is human stories.”

“Why are you _here_?” I finally managed to say.

The ellimist sighed, and looked back at me. “I need your help.”

“Of course you do. Isn’t this the part where you threaten us with imminent taxxon death if we don’t agree, or puppet my friend around and mislead him about what you’ll give him in return?” I glanced about. The play and the audience had frozen sometime during our conversation, and the Animorphs were as frozen as everyone else. Did he need just my help? Not all of us?

“This is different. Before, humans needed your help. Hork-bajir needed your help. I was merely the facilitator. But now...” he spread his hands. “I am trying to approach you with humility. I am not experienced at working within your social systems.”

“I can tell, because you think hijacking my dreams is humble.”

“Your group have reacted… poorly to my communication in the past. I thought that working within an environment where my actions are normal and expected, such as a dream, might be less distressing for you.” He looked away. “I am trying. Your social systems are extremely complicated. I considered appearing on my knees and begging you, but I had the sense that you would probably find that ridiculous.”

“You sensed correctly. What’s the big problem you need my help for?”

“This will require some… explanation. You are not going to like anything I have to say. I apologise for that.”

Telling me what to like didn’t sound all that humble to me, but I let it go. “Okay,” I said. “I’m listening.”

“Good,” he said. “Then I will tell you an ellimist story. And you can tell me the ending.”

He stood up, took my hand, and pulled me one step forward, out of the world.


	2. Chapter 2

 

We stood on lavender sands that stretched to the horizon in every direction. The only feature I could see was an eighteen-foot wooden pole about ten feet away. It was as wide as my torso, and hollow, with several holes drilled into it. It looked like a tree had grown straight up out of the sand and somebody had carved away at it until the trunk was nothing but a giant flute. Desert winds whistled through the wood, playing a haunting tune over the sands.

“Once upon a time, there was a flute, and that flute was made by a master woodworker,” the ellimist said. Then he frowned. “No, this is too far back. This will mean nothing to you.” He took my hand again, and we stepped forward into another place.

This time we stood on an enormous crystal, as big as an aircraft carrier. It was flying, even though it was far too heavy to do so, above a land covered in lava.

“Once upon a time, there were the crystals, and the stewards who tended them,” the ellimist said. “No, this is still unnecessary. How do you begin one of these things? How do you know where the beginning is?”

“Why not start with the earliest bit of information that I actually need to know?” I asked, trying to sound patient.

“Very well.”

We stepped forward again, this time into…

Where we were had no space. There was no up, down, left, right. There was no inside or outside. There just _was_. I was there and it, the ellimist, was there, but I couldn’t have told you if it was ahead of me or behind me, bigger or smaller than me. It reminded me of that time we’d all been sucked into zero-space, with the notable advantage that I didn’t appear to be dying.

 _Once upon a time, there was us,_ the ellimist said in my mind, forming its words from my own thoughts. _We loved the novelty of the galaxy. We moved from place to place, always fascinated by what would come into existence next, always fascinated by what new things it would show us, by what remarkable traits it would have. We danced with intelligent suns and sang with fish that lived under ice and had centuries-long conversations with slow-acting, hive-minded molds._

_But then, there was him._

And something else was with us. I couldn’t see it, quite, in the absence of space. But I knew what it was, kind of. A huge red eye, supported by machines that pumped air into its laboured… something that wasn’t there…

_Do not be unnerved. You merely see only part of him. He is not like you or I. He is not spawned by this universe, but exiled here from another. He is not… completely here, in the sense that you can perceive dimensions._

“He’s evil,” I said, completely sure of it as I said it. The thing reeked of malevolence.

_From your perspective, yes, I suppose that he is. From mine, too. Who can say for sure whether we are framing the world in our own version of a false assumption of the divine right of kings? But he –_

“I don’t want to be here anymore,” I said, trying to turn away from the thing – an impossibility when there is no concept of space. “Take me somewhere else.”

We returned to the dream assembly. Frozen dancers grinning fixedly at frozen children.

“He is called Crayak,” the ellimist told me. “He is my greatest enemy. The antithesis of everything we… I… stand for. Crayak wishes to see this universe… simpler. To him, the endless variety spawned here is mere rot and decay. He desires consistency; a singular, perfect species, judged by his criteria, and subservient to him. The strongest species, alone in the universe, while he controls spacetime itself. A stable universe.”

“One species is.. is nothing!” I exclaimed, revolted. “He’s pretty much planning to wipe out all life, ever, in the universe? Is that what you’re saying?”

“Yes. In practical terms, that is his goal.”

I felt the blood leaving my face. “And you fight him?”

“I warned you that you would not like this story. You are distracted by your own war. I should not have come here. I apologise.” He made as if to leave, but I grabbed his arm.

“You can’t tell me about the most evil thing that can possibly exist and then just tell me it’s not my problem and walk away.”

The ellimist cocked its head. “You think that wiping out all species bar one in the universe is the most evil notion that could ever exist?”

“Well,” I said sarcastically, “I suppose that mathematically, all species bar none would be worse. But yes.”

“Cassie, if you were cleaning your room, and you found a nest of cockroaches in the back of your closet, what would you do with them?”

“Are you comparing a few cockroaches to all life, everywhere?”

“I am trying to explain how natural scope affects these decisions. To you, wiping out some cockroaches is nothing – you’re cleaning your room. Your world is far bigger than your room. You can walk outside of it and behold the beauty of life all around you, and compared to that, a few roaches are irrelevant. The world that you are biologically programmed to comprehend is far bigger than your bedroom – it’s about the distance that a migratory human tribe could be expected to cover over the course of a year. Anything bigger than that, and you have to resort to abstracts. Anything bigger than that, and minor crimes become incomprehensible evils, separated not by feelings but by mathematics.

“My world is bigger than yours. I can just about comprehend a galaxy. My ‘room’ is somewhere between the size of a country or a planet. See? And Crayak… he is on a different scale altogether. This is vitally important to understand. To Crayak, eliminating whole planets is not evil, but inconsequential. To Crayak, wiping out almost all life in this universe, the only home you or I have ever known, is a chore akin to you tidying your room.”

“So you’re saying, what? That makes it okay?”

“I am saying that he thinks that what he does is okay, and there is nothing that little voices like yours or mine can possibly do to convince him otherwise. We simply don’t have the perspective or the power.”

“I thought you were all-powerful.”

“No. I only seem so from your more limited perspective.” The ellimist contemplated the still stage for a moment. “When we first met, we fought. We threw everything that we had at each other. It was a logical decision, see? If one could only remove the other, we would have nothing standing between us and our goal.” He sighed. “It went rather poorly. I would be too ashamed to tell you how many species died in our conflict, how many wonders of nature were eliminated forever. And the handful of threads of spacetime that he had studiously gathered over the millennia before meeting me were torn from his grasp, the rules changed; he had to start all over again. In the end, we decided that direct confrontation was only hurting both of us. We devised… other methods.”

“Other methods?”

“A game. Solid rules limiting both of our actions. Much of the ‘choice’ is outsourced to non-players, people inhabiting various planets across the universe. There is a lot of negotiation between us. A lot of gambling. Very little direct fighting between us.”

“Is that ‘outsourced’ too?”

“Of course.”

I gave him a disgusted look, and he raised an eyebrow.

“Would you rather a fight devastate a continent, or a galaxy?”

“Fine. But you made him sound so much more powerful than you. Why can’t he just wipe you out and pick up the pieces later, unopposed?”

The ellimist shrugged. “Power is relative. He is… larger than me. I am more intimately connected with this universe. It is a question of careful positioning. It is like… well, if this universe is Crayak’s room and he’s trying to clean it up, I’m a squirrel he needs to kick out first. He might have a big broom, but I’m smart enough to sit next to his very expensive new lamp, forcing him to back up and negotiate.”

“And us little people are the roaches in his closet?”

“It isn’t a perfect metaphor.”

“Wiping out other worlds just because they’re smaller, like they don’t matter?” I grimaced. “It’s sick.”

“Like destroying a termite nest to break into a logging camp?” the ellimist asked with a gentle smile.

I looked away. “What do you want from me?”

The ellimist looked away. “Outsourcing, I’m afraid. There is a planet, a very long way away from yours. It is called Iskoort, as are its people. If left alone, it should have no impact on anything that happens on earth within your lifetime. But it is strategically relevant, in the grand scheme of things. Crayak wants the population dead. I want them alive.”

“So what’s the game?”

“A battle to the death. Eight of my champions against eight of his. The battle will take place on Iskoort itself, although the citizens are not allowed to be harmed. Winner is the last team with champions surviving, who will be returned to their original locations from the moment they left.”

“And if I say no?”

“There are others I could ask. I came to you because I believe that you have a great chance of success. But you are not obligated to assist me.”

“How long do I have to decide?”

“Sometime tomorrow would be ideal.”

I nodded. “I’ll think about it.”

“Thank you.”

And with that, sound and motion returned to the world. I looked at the stage, startled, and when I looked back to the ellimist, it was gone.


	3. Chapter 3

I woke up. It was Saturday. My birthday. Should I spend my fifteenth birthday opening presents and eating cake, or should I spend it fighting to the death on some planet I’d never heard of?

That ellimist had the absolute worst ever sense of timing.

I didn’t think too hard about it while I got through my morning chores. It wasn’t a decision I was going to make without talking it over with the Animorphs first, and they wouldn’t arrive until around ten for the party. I tried not to think about it while helping Dad clean cages, and accepting a birthday kiss on the cheek from Mom.

The whole thing was pretty insane, right? Fighting the yeerks was one thing. We’d been doing that for quite a while. But this ellimist, this godlike being who kept crashing into our lives, wanted me to jaunt across the galaxy and kill – just straight-up kill – eight people I’d never met to help him in some intergalactic chess game. And I had only his word that it was somehow really important, in the long run. And it had to be dangerous. Insanely dangerous. There was a good chance I’d never come back, right?

But… to save an entire planet. Eight lives for a planet.

I’d killed far more than that to protect the Earth.

My parents started setting up for the party. I went for a walk to clear my head.

“Hi,” Erek said, walking out from behind the barn.

I closed my eyes and took a deep, calming breath. I didn’t have time for this. “Okay,” I said. “How is the world in peril now?”

“What? No, no! I just… I came by to give you a birthday present.” He handed me a small, brightly wrapped box.

“Oh. Well. Thank you.” I took the box. “Is Jenny okay?”

“Her mind is intact. We are still repairing her systems. It may take a few years.”

“I’m sorry to hear that.”

He shrugged. “It’s very little time to a chee. Thanks for saving her.”

“It was our fault she was in trouble in the first place.”

“No, it was ours. We weren’t careful enough.” Erek hesitated. “Cassie, I… I just want to thank you guys. The Animorphs, I mean. For everything. Can you pass that message on for me?”

“What’s going on, Erek?”

“Nothing. I just… look, we wear masks in public, all the time, to survive. We have for thousands of years. We participate in society and we make friends and all that, but chee only really get to be chee around, well, other chee. And we’re a small group that have known each other for a really long time, you know? And when humans do find aliens living among them, historically, things have tended to be… well. So it’s not often that we get human… human friends. Especially ones who at least try to understand. Anyway. I just wanted to say thanks for everything. That’s all.” He turned and started to walk away. I grabbed his arm.

“Seriously, Erek, what’s up? That little speech was one step away from a suicide note. This isn’t like you.”

“It’s not… I mean, in theory, there’s a chance I might not die.”

“Well that’s reassuring. If you’re in trouble...”

He shook his head. “It’s nothing you can help with. It’s… really complicated, it’s not any of your responsibility, and even if you wanted to there’s no real way for you to get involved. Just have a good birthday, alright?”

“Ah, yes, because nothing else we’ve ever done together has ever been complicated.”

“Cassie, it really doesn’t – ”

I played my trump card. “Involve me? Like interstellar treaties and spaceship crashes in the Australian desert don’t involve me?”

He looked away. “It’s nothing like that.”

“You couldn’t give me an explanation back then. I think at the very least, you owe me one now.”

He laughed hollowly. “I’m on a mission from God.”

I stepped back. That had definitely not been the sort of answer I’d been expecting. “What.”

“His plans require – ”

“God is _real_?!”

“Yes, of course. I mean, mine is. I don’t know if any human gods are.”

“And he’s, what, sending you to die?”

“There is the theoretical possibility of survival.”

“Oh, well, I’m sure that’s comforting.”

“Our god is… well, he has been described as many things. ‘Comforting’ is not one of those things. He is...” Erek wrinkled his nose. “He’s not the sort of god you hope to be chosen by.”

I stared at him for several seconds, then took a deep, calming breath. “Erek. This is a long shot, but does the term ‘ellimist’ mean anything to you?”

Erek’s expression darkened. “Where did you hear that word?”

“I think you should probably stay for the party.”

 


	4. Chapter 4

Jake and Rachel were the first to arrive. They brought Homer with them, and as soon as he leapt out of the car, our ancient alien friend with the god-given cosmic mission broke into a grin and ran over to scratch him behind the ears. Jake and Rachel ignored this; they had no time for alien robot dogs. They marched straight over to me.

“Say, Cassie,” Rachel said, “Jake and I both had kind of weird dreams last night. Did you…?”

I nodded. “He explain everything to you?”

“He wants an answer today!”

“Worst timing ever.”

“Eight champions, he said,” Jake said. “If it’s us three, then that’s probably all the Animorphs. But even including David, that’s only seven.”

I nodded at Erek, who was lying in the dirt, a very enthusiastic golden retriever licking his face, pretending to growl at him.

“Seriously?” Rachel asked.

“Yeah.”

“The ellimist knows he can’t fight, right?”

“It’s weirder than that,” I said. “Way weirder.”

<Hey, guys!> A golden eagle swooped over our heads. <I had the weirdest dream last night.>

“Jesus, David!” I hissed. “Go demorph! My parents are here!”

<Sure, sure, whatever.> David disappeared from sight.

Tobias and Ax walked out of the barn together, Tobias straightening Ax’s collar. I could tell at a glance that Rachel had picked out their party outfits. The only thing weirder than seeing them as humans was seeing them looking like they were walking out of a clothing catalogue.

They both looked extremely unhappy about something. Yep, the ellimist must have visited them, too.

My mom came out of the house, smiling. “Welcome, everyone! Welcome! Is this the whole group?”

“We’re still waiting on Marco,” I told her. “And Da… uh...”

“Dennis,” Jake said.

“This is Erek King,” I said, indicating the boy throwing a stick for Homer to completely ignore. “Can he stay?”

“Oh, yes, yes, I know Erek,” Mom said, waving a hand. “He helps out with the strays at the animal shelter near The Gardens.”

“Of course he does,” Jake muttered under his breath.

Marco arrived five minutes later, while we were helping to set out chairs. David had borrowed his DNA to change his own features enough that Mom didn’t immediately call the police on sight, so they looked weirdly similar. Animorphs looking like other Animorphs was creepy no matter how many times I saw it. Or did it.

“Okay,” Jake said as soon as the eight of us were alone. “Ellimist dreams? Everyone? Everyone know what’s going on?”

We all nodded.

“Question,” David said, raising his hand. “Several questions, actually.”

“Go on.”

“Who the hell is this ellimist guy? He said he’d worked with you before.”

“‘Worked with’,” Tobias said bitterly. “That’s one way of putting it.”

“His intentions… seem good,” I said. “So far as we can tell.”

“He’s a bit of a dick,” Marco said. “What?” he added when we all looked at him. “He is!”

“Ellimists are not to be trusted-duh-duh-duh,” Ax said grimly. He would’ve come across as solemn, if fruit pie wasn’t already dribbling down his chin. “They arrrre tricksters. Liars.”

“I’m more inclined to trust him than not,” I said. “I mean, he’s never really been… straightforward with us, but our dealings tend to involve us coming out ahead.”

“How so?” David asked.

“Remember how we told you to never ever be in morph for more than two hours or you’d be stuck forever?” Tobias asked.

“Yeah.”

“And you know how I’m a bird but can still morph?”

“I thought it might be weird to ask about that.”

Tobias shrugged. “He pays well for favours.”

“Not well enough,” Rachel growled.

“Well, he didn’t offer me anything when he asked me to go into this weird death fight,” David said.

“He might not be allowed to, for some reason,” Rachel said. “This time was… nice, for him. This was him being really nice. He might actually be in a really tight corner, and hoping we’ll help.”

“The godlike, omnipotent being is in a tight corner and needs a handful of American teenagers to help,” Marco said. “Yeah, I kind of hope he’s lying. I do not want to live in a universe where stuff like that happens.”

“Question two,” David said. “Who’s this guy? What’s he doing here?” He jerked his thumb at Erek, who was idly folding a complicated origami bird out of a party napkin.

“That’s actually a pretty good question,” Marco said. “I mean, not saying you’re not super useful and all that, Erek, but for a straight-up fight to the death?”

Erek shrugged. “My god calls, and I answer. I trust his wisdom.”

“Your what now?” Rachel asked.

“Did you walk into a live power line or something?” Marco asked.

“Who are you?” David asked. “I mean, I know you work as a yeerk spy or whatever, but what does any of that have to do with this?”

“This has nothing to do with the yeerks,” Erek said. “I’m here because I am an ancient alien android who, with the last of my kind, has been using advanced holographic technology to hide among your species for millennia as caretakers of the only fragment of our homes we have left, the souls of our creators, which live on in dogs. Your teammates aren’t happy about me being involved because they know I am physically incapable of violence or deliberate harm due to the way I was programmed. They’re worried I’ll be useless in a fight at best, and at worst an active roadblock who they will be obligated to protect.”

We stared at him.

“What?” he asked. “Like he wasn’t going to find out? Were you just going to show up on Iskoort with me and sort of hope he didn’t notice?”

“I don’t think we should go to Iskoort at all,” Marco said. “I don’t see how this is our problem.”

“It is the fate of a planet,” I pointed out.

“Under the protection of an all-knowing time-controller who could make the whole Earth disappear by just thinking about it. Why are we a part of this? What, we can protect a planet but he can’t? That’s garbage. He’s jerking us around

, like he always does. He jerked us around with that whole human nature preserve thing, he jerked us around with the hork-bajir, and now he’s jerking us around with this. He’s a liar.”

“I don’t think he’s ever actually lied to us,” I said.

“Oh, no, nothing a good lawyer couldn’t weasel out of,” Marco said. “But he’s done everything he can to mislead us. Why would this be any different?”

“Marco’s right,” Tobias said. “Nothing the ellimist ever says or does is what you think he’s saying or doing. I don’t think his intentions even matter here, not really, because every time we take him at his word, we get screwed over. Maybe he is trying to help us, but for that to work we have to refuse. Like that EGS tower thing. If we’d’ve just said ‘yes, take us to another planet, please’ right away like he offered, the Earth would be in serious trouble right now.”

“I am so confused,” David muttered.

“This merits some study,” Ax said. “Stuh-deedeedeeeee. But we have little time.”

“Which is also suspicious, for a guy who can control time,” Rachel said, crossing her arms. “And his current story is… what? Now he’s in some universe-spanning stand-off with Cosmic Hitler? This doesn’t even make sense, compared to what we know of him from before. He’s just telling us an entirely new story about who he even is. I don’t buy it. I don’t buy this Crayak dude.”

“He’s real,” Jake said quietly. We turned to look at him. He looked green.

“Who?” Rachel asked. “Crayak?”

Jake nodded. “I never told anyone about this, because… well, to be perfectly honest, I thought it was brain damage. I didn’t think it was relevant. But I’ve seen him before. I’ve seen Crayak.”


	5. Chapter 5

“When?” I asked Jake.

He licked his lips. “Remember Temrash?”

I took Jake’s hand. Rachel’s hands balled into fists. Marco eyed his best friend cautiously.

“A yeerk death isn’t… pleasant. He was throwing a lot of memories and sensations at me, there at the end. He didn’t mean to, it was… the yeerk version of screaming, I guess. I saw a lot of things. And then, right on the edge of death, I saw...” he shrugged. “It was the most horrifying thing I’d ever seen, but it was kind of hard to be sure, y’know? Because I couldn’t really… comprehend it as a thing. It was just… wrong. Like how morphing used to creep us out because halfway through things would look wrong, but times a billion. The only part I could really comprehend was the sensation of an unfathomably huge eye, and I could only comprehend that because it _saw_ me. It was watching me, like… like I was a frog it was dissecting for biology class, and it was really grossed out but needed to get all the details down to pass the class, you know? It was looking right at me and I...” He stopped and took a deep, shaky breath. “Anyway, like I said, I just figured it was brain damage or something; I mean, an alien slug had just died inside my actual head. But last night, when the ellimist was taking me on his little tragic story, I recognised it. He showed me a… a toned-down version. But I recognised it.”

I squeezed Jake’s hand. He squeezed back.

“Did he explain why?” Rachel asked. “The ellimist?”

“Yeah. He said… I didn’t really understand most of it, but he said something about, through Temrash, me being able to temporarily see over the cusp of death. He said that I’d gained Crayak’s interest because he wanted to know how I was involved with him. With the ellimist, I mean.”

“So what you’re saying,” Tobias said, crossing his arms, “is that everything is the ellimist’s fault.”

I glanced at Marco. He didn’t see me; he was too busy staring hard at Jake. Frowning like he was trying to solve some impossible puzzle.

“I say we let this ellimist solve its own problems,” Rachel said. “We have plenty of chances to die saving a planet right here.”

“I agree,” Erek said.

We all looked at him in surprise.

“Hang on a sec,” Marco said, “weren’t you all gung-ho for this?”

“I will fight Ellimist’s battle. You should not. It was extremely cruel of him to involve any of you.”

“You want to go _alone_?!” I asked.

“That’s suicide,” Jake said. “You can’t fight.”

“He wouldn’t be alone,” David said. “This ellimist dude would pick someone else. Right?”

Erek shrugged. He looked very calm, for somebody about to march to his death.

“I’m sure it would,” I said. “I asked what would happen if I said no and...” I frowned. What had the ellimist said? What had been its exact words?

“Erek, if anyone shouldn’t go, it’s you,” Rachel said. “You can’t fight, and just mathematically speaking, you have a lot more years to lose than any of us. Why is this your problem and not ours, exactly? It seems like way more of an Animorphs problem than a chee problem.”

“Trust me on this,” Erek said. “It is my problem. Not yours. Ellimist should never have approached you about it. It’s better that I go alone than that I drag you along.” He was still calm. Unnaturally calm.

“You’ll die,” I said.

“Probably, yes.”

I peered closely at him. There was no hint of anything other than general amiability in his features. I’d spent a fair amount of time around chee; I knew that they generally wore their expressions and tones like humans, mirroring their emotions and state of mind. There should be some sign of restrained rage or frustration, like a human would show. But I also knew that their human faces were a matter of personal choice; they could wear any hologram they wanted. Which meant that Erek had… unlinked his hologram from his emotions, somehow. He was choosing not to show emotion; not in the way a human could suppress them, but completely. I’d never seen him do that before, no matter how bad things got.

The only conclusion I could draw was that Erek must be absolutely furious. Far too angry to restrain himself normally.

“I’m still confused about this god thing,” Marco said. “You called him your god.”

Erek shrugged again. “What do you call an all-powerful creator-being who issues commandments about virtuous and sinful living?”

“Huh?”

He sighed. “Ellimist created the pemalites. It was he who laid down the edicts and values of their species and civilisations. The ones that they passed on to us.”

“He created a species?” I asked, surprised.

“Why is that difficult to believe? You know that my species was created. Is it that much different that my creators were, too? Who Ellimist is isn’t the point. The point is that this isn’t your fight and none of you should be involved.”

“Why is it your fight?” I asked. “Because this ellimist says so?”

“No. I mean, sort of. Did any of you ask who you would be fighting?”

“Crayak’s champions, right?” Tobias asked.

“Did you ask who they were?”

We all looked at each other. I could feel my face flushing. Here we were, playing gung-ho space warriors, and none of us had even thought to find out what we were fighting against.

Erek angled himself so that he couldn’t be seen from the house, then spread his hands apart. A hologram shimmered into existence between them.

It was an alien. Presumably. To me, it looked like one of those cheap transformer toys that have extra bits of one form visible when they’re changed into the other form. It stood on two long legs that bowed inward at the knees and ended in broad, flat feet with no obvious toes. It had four arms, two in approximately the same place as human arms, tipped in four-fingered hands, but over the back of the hands were secondary hands with vicious-looking claws that could be pulled forward over the hand or folded back out of the way. A second set of arms protruded from the back, where a human’s shoulder blades would be. They didn’t look capable of reaching all the way around the front. They didn’t have hands, but instead had vicious-looking hooks.

The head looked like someone had crossed a pug dog with a lizard. Floppy ears framed a face that had been squashed in under an oversized bottom jaw from which two fangs, or possibly tusks, protruded. Some kind of pale, silky-looking fur started at the creature’s brow and moved down its back in a single white strip. The fur stood out because the rest of the alien looked like it was made of still-cooling lava, all cracked grey-black plates over gently glowing orange and red skin. From its face, two startling robins-egg blue eyes peered out of the mottled surface.

“I’ve seen that before,” Marco said.

Erek nodded. “You have seen a hologram of it before, in my basement. This is a howler. They, too, are an artificial race, created by Crayak. Ellimist and Crayak like to copy each others’ tricks, see? Howlers exist only to destroy. They are the perfect killing machines, moving from planet to planet, wiping out all sentient life in their path. The first time I ever knew of their existence was when they came to eliminate the pemalites.”

“So this is a revenge thing for you, then,” Marco said.

“No, not revenge. It’s… it’s far too complicated to explain here. Just know that these are beings designed specifically to wipe out life planet by planet. If you go to Iskoort, you will die.”

“So will you,” Jake said.

“This must be why Erek’s here,” David said. “He’s the spy guy with this yeerk thing, right? Maybe that’s what he’s supposed to be on Iskoort, too. He has the information, we have the firepower.”

“That is probably what Ellimist wants you to believe,” Erek said. “But please, please trust me on this. You can’t go.”

“If you’re going, I’m going,” I said. “Chee and Animorphs each saving each others’ butts seems to be about ninety per cent of what any of us do these days.”

“Then I won’t go,” Erek said.

“Really?” Marco asked. “You’re giving up your revenge that easily?”

“I told you. It’s not about revenge. I will not drag any of you into this.”

“Well, I’m going anyway,” Rachel said. “I hate the ellimist, but if this is fate-of-the-galaxy stuff...”

“Me too,” David said quickly. “I joined to kick butt. Let’s kick butt.”

“Why do you people have to be like this?” Erek asked testily.

“Sorry,” Jake said. “We just are. Time to vote.”

 _Each champion decides for themselves_ , said a thought in my head that wasn’t mine.

Jake shook his head. “Animorphs don’t work that way, mister ellimist. We vote.”

_And you, Memitor?_

“You know my choice,” Erek muttered, bitterly.

“Who wants caaaaake?” Mom called, manoeuvring an enormous birthday cake through the back door. Jake dashed over to hold the door for her.

“If you guys are going, I’m going,” Tobias muttered.

“I still think I should go alone,” Erek said.

“If you want to be alone, stay home.”

“Absolutely not.”

The cake was placed on the trestle table. Fifteen candles were lit. My friends and parents gathered around to sing Happy Birthday.

Spend a day relaxing with friends, presents and cake, or go and fight a genocidal war species to the death to save a planet?

I took a deep breath, closed my eyes, and leaned toward the candles.

Duh. Of course I was going.

And then there was nothing but colour and noise.


	6. Chapter 6

<Strangers! Strangers! Sell your memories to me, strangers; I beg of you.>

I flinched back from the strange creature shoving its face towards mine, and stumbled into Ax, who was in his andalite body. The seven of us stood in a small group, all in our normal bodies, on a large, crowded platform. I was wearing my morphing outfit, but the couple of dollars and note paper I usually kept in the sleeves of my gloves were gone. Everyone else looked similarly devoid of equipment. Erek didn’t even have his hologram up.

Around us was chaos.

<l will buy your memories!>

<Come visit my execution parlor!>

<Give me your clothing and I will give you credit!>

<Here! Eat this larva! Let it gestate and we'll split the proceeds between your heirs!>

<You stink horribly! I will cleanse you!>

And to Ax: <Become my partner and we will sell your fur as a gachak poison!>

"What is this, Planet of the Salesmen?" Marco demanded. "Back off! All of you, back off!"

The aliens crowding us looked like nothing I’d ever seen before. They were… well, I had a lot of experience with the beauty and variety of nature, and even I was having a hard time thinking there was anything beautiful about them. They were short, coming up to about the middle of my chest, although they seemed capable of stretching up to about eye height if they really wanted to. This was because their abdomens looked like zany biological accordions that bounced the upper half of their bodies slightly up and down as they shallowly, noisily, breathed.

Atop their abdomens were rigid chests that I couldn’t get a good look at because they were covered by brightly colored vests. Their shoulders were a sort of oval platform, flat across, from which two arms dangled, each with three joints, each ending in a long tentacle finger and two shorter hooked fingers. They didn’t look to have proper shoulder rotation; if there was a shoulder joint at all, it was one with a very limited range. Their hips seemed better, although their legs were ridiculous. They walked on extremely long, narrow feet shaped a bit like a human calf and topped with small, hooked toes, giving the disturbing impression that they were walking on knees that bent backwards. I wondered if they could rise up on tiptoes if they wanted to and give themselves an extra foot and a half of height that way. It seemed plausible. Their heads looked like featherless vultures, swaying on long, slender necks, with jerky eyes that couldn’t seem to rest on one thing for more than a few seconds.

All in all, they looked like a six-year-old had created a monster out of scrap paper and pipe cleaners, and somebody had transmuted it to pink, veiny flesh.

“Why is this body type so popular with sapient species?” I asked.

“Cassie, I don’t know what you’ve been drinking,” Marco said, “but I have never seen anything like these guys.”

“No, you have. A head at the top with eyes and mouth, a neck and shoulders supporting two limbs separated from two lower limbs by a section with organs and breathing apparatus. Limbs are all the same structure – a few bones with hands or feet at the ends. Bilateral symmetry, similar approximations in sense organs and their placement. Us, hork-bajir, pemalites, these guys… even andalites and Leerans are just minor variations. Howlers, who are apparently so impressive, are like this with some extra bits stuck on.” I squinted. “I can’t be sure, but I think these guys might have spines. Like us. Like hork-bajir. Like andalites. It’s weird.”

“Yes, Cassie,” Marco said, deadpan. “That is what’s really weird about this place. It’s too much like home.”

The platform we stood on was miles in the air. I could just about see the ground over the edge (no safety railing, of course), but it was difficult to make out among the bases of similar enormous towers of platforms. There were buildings around us, but they weren’t part of the structure; this was no skyscraper, where the ceiling of one level reached to the floor of the next to make a single, coherent building. This was more like somebody had built a whole bunch of platforms with no clear goal and then, later on, other people had come and put buildings on those platforms. And the platforms…

There was no rhyme or reason, no regularity, to the size, color, height or material of each level. We stood on a bright blue surface that felt like plastic, and ten feet above us sagged the dark red floor of the next level up, which seemed to be placed above ours at an odd angle. On the next building, I could see a fifty foot high space between platforms, and a five foot one on the platform above it. The buildings didn’t seem to indicate that one level needed more space than another, and the brightly colored braces wedged in to hold the structure up looked about to bend, break or slip out at any moment.

Imagine that someone starts with all the Legos in the world. Add in all the Duplos and cheap bargain Duplos and let some humongous kid assemble them all into a tower a hundred miles tall.

Assume that no sensible adult ever becomes involved, except to come along occasionally and wedge in what looks like crutches the size of skyscrapers.

That’s what we were standing on. That was all I could see over the edge of the platform. I couldn’t fathom how this planet could even exist. Why bring howlers to destroy it? Wait a few weeks, and most of the population would die in building collapses before the rest starve to death desperately trying to sell chips of concrete to each other.

<Sell me your fur for a room at my inn!> an iskoort whined, reaching for Rachel’s hair.

“Touch it and die,” she growled. The iskoort lowered their hand.

“Uh, guys? Is the robot broken?” David asked, jerking a thumb at Erek.

Erek was standing in the exact pose he’d arrived in, six feet of immobile chrome and steel. He paid no attention whatsoever to the iskoort pawing at him. He paid no attention to us, either.

Tobias landed on his shoulder, flaring his wings and shrieking, causing the iskoort to flinch back enough for Ax to get between them and Erek. I grabbed his arm and shook him. I might as well have tried to shake a concrete pillar. “Erek!” I said. “Erek, are you alright?” How did you give a chee first aid? “Erek! I don’t know how to reach… does anybody know his real name?”

“What did the ellimist call him?” Jake asked. “Memmer-something?”

Marco snapped his fingers in Erek’s face. “Snap out of it, dude. None of us took advanced android repair at school.”

<Is that course offered?> Ax asked, interested.

Erek’s hologram flickered on, causing Tobias to jump up and resettle on his holographic shoulder. His eyes were glazed, panicked. “Where are we?” he whispered.

“Context clues suggest Iskoort,” Marco shrugged. “Unless you have new information.”

“No, where are the chee?” Erek’s voice was rising. “I can’t hear anyone. I can’t find the ship or the chee or the pemalites or...” It was a good thing that chee don’t need to breathe, or he definitely would have been hyperventilating.

<Chee-net!> Tobias said suddenly. <He can’t find the chee-net. Dude, you’re fine. Everything’s all safe on Earth. We’re just light-years away, remember? That’s why you can’t talk to them.>

“Right,” he said, visibly trying to calm down. “Right. Of course. Stupid of me not to think about it.” His hologram flickered, and was suddenly perfectly calm. He was hiding his feelings again. “So now, we should…?”

“Find some howlers,” Rachel said. “I don’t suppose you have some kind of cool alien sensor that picks them out?”

“If I had, my creators would not have been taken by surprise,” Erek pointed out.

“We need to establish a base of operations,” Jake said. “Somewhere to regroup and hash out our plan.”

“How?” Marco asked.

We looked around at the yammering chaos of strange buildings, colorful platforms, and aliens trying to sell us things.

“Rachel?” Jake asked.

Rachel put her hands around her mouth to make a megaphone. “You want to sell us something?” she called. “We need a guide!”

Silence, for about half a second. Then,

<I will guide you to the most delicious meats on the planet!>

<For your internal organs, all of my memories of the planet are yours!>

<Give me your android and I will show you the greatest sights on Iskoort!>

The one who wanted Rachel’s hair warbled excitedly. <I will get you an excellent guide! My own grub! I will sell him to you for your fur!>

Rachel looked vaguely revolted by both halves of this deal. “ _Sell_ him? You mean we can _hire_ him, right?”

The iskoort gave a whine that sounded to me like confusion. <Yes. You would need to hire him. But you cannot do so unless I introduce you! He is very good, very much in demand. Very difficult to get a hold of, if you do not have connections like me.>

“Oh.” Jake relaxed. “You want to sell us his location. Make introductions.”

<Yes.>

He looked around at the group. We all shrugged or gave vague gestures of assent.

“For her hair?” Jake asked.

<Yes.>

“I am NOT going bald,” Rachel said. “I’m definitely not going bald in the middle of a birthday party, in front of Cassie’s parents. Trade something else.”

“No need,” Jake said. “Cassie?”

I was already concentrating. I grew taller, my skin paled, my morphing outfit melted into the larger one I’d bought ages ago when I’d first realised that the only thing more awkward than being in my best friend’s body was being in my best friend’s body in a very skintight outfit that didn’t fit her properly. My short, tight, curly hair was sucked into my head and replaced by a wave of gold.

My Rachel morph had hair about an inch shorter than the real Rachel, but I didn’t think the iskoort would complain. He was staring openly in fascination. All of the iskoort were. The thought-speak cacaphony had been silenced; the only sign of life was the irritating whine of a hundred accordion diaphragms.

It was a glorious moment of peace. Then:

<For this ability I will sell you my cousin’s memories of being eaten by a terthal!>

<Change into me and we will go into business together! I have high quality, saleable organs!>

<Teach me to become very small! We will make a fortune in low-mass transportation!>

“Somebody please just cut my hair so we can get out of here,” I said.

Erek stepped forward, scissors appearing in his hands. I wondered if he’d pulled them out of his body somewhere, or if he could make working hologram blades. He worked very quickly and efficiently.

“You’re good at this,” I said.

“I used to cut Catherine the Great’s hair,” he explained. “Although she’d fire me for this hack job.”

“I’m about to demorph anyway,” I said. “We don’t need neat, I just want to get out of here.”

“That’s what I figured.” Seconds later, our iskoort friend was in possession of several thick handfuls of shiny blonde hair, which he stuffed into a pouch on a belt around his waist, whining happily.

<And now,> he said, <to Guide!>


	7. Chapter 7

We followed the iskoort. I demorphed on the way. Now that we were in the middle of a deal with an iskoort, the others gave us a little bit of space. They didn’t disappear, but their offers became a lot less forceful, and nobody physically tried to grab us.

“It’s not my name, by the way,” Erek told Marco as we walked.

“What?”

“The thing Ellimist called me. I hate being called that. Hate it. Just so you know.”

Marco nodded. “Noted.”

“What is it?” David asked. I shot him a look, which he ignored.

Erek looked like he wasn’t going to answer. But then he sighed and said, “It’s just a title.”

“What, like ‘Mr’ but for androids?”

“More like… a knighthood.”

David’s brows shot up. “Wow! How did you – ?”

“Do we really have to have this conversation?” Erek asked testily.

David rolled his eyes. “Sor-ree.”

Erek didn’t seem to think this comment merited a reply.

We were led into a small building that looked like it was made of Lincoln Logs, where we were introduced to Guide. That was his name: Guide. Actually it was Guide, grub of Skin-Seller, brother of Memory Wholesaler, of the Secondary Inner Artisan’s District, but we apparently weren’t expected to remember the whole thing.

He was a young Iskoort. Which did not make him any less annoying. His initial price for his services was the last foot and a half of Ax’s tail.

Ax said no.

After several minutes of negotiation in which Guide refused to either send us away or budge on his price, Marco said, "You know what? You jerk us around, Guide, and Ax will give you the last foot and a half of his tail."

Guide understood the threat. It was at this point that he actually took a look at the rest of us, and happily traded a handful of Tobias’ feathers for what turned out, after some quick conversions between time systems, to be about a day’s worth of his time. His only other demand was exclusivity – anything we sold to him, we couldn’t sell to anyone else.

“First things first,” Rachel said the moment negotiations were complete. “We’re looking for some aliens called howlers. There should be eight of them. Seen them around anywhere?”

Guide whined in his diaphragm. <The City of Beauty is temporary home to many visiting off-worlders,> he said. <Although few have the courage and distinguished tastes to venture quite this deep into the Inner Districts, I still do not know by name – >

Erek projected his howler hologram for Guide. Guide stopped breathing for several seconds, treating us to temporary silence. Then, unconvincingly, he said, <Ah, no, this is somebody that I have not seen. Perhaps you would like to plan your search over a relaxing meal at the – >

“Actually, we’d rather get this over with,” Marco interrupted. “Honestly I could go without meeting the howlers too, but this isn’t a ‘leave and live to fight another day’ kind of mission. We need to find these guys.”

Guide whined.<I do not know of – >

“Guide,” Jake said, “don’t lie to us. Have you ever met an andalite before?” He jerked his thumb towards Ax.

Guide shot a nervous glance at Ax. <No.>

“Well, andalites have the power to mind-meld with people. They can look right inside their thoughts and know if they're lying, and if you are lying, they make your head explode."

No one cracked a smile. Although Marco had to struggle.

Guide's whine rose and fell. It probably meant something, but I didn't know what. Then, <Howlers? Did you say howlers? There may be one or two howlers around.>

"Try eight," Jake said. "Where are they? And do you know why they're here?"

<They come to trade, like all who visit our world. They trade memories for boda salts. Howler memories are very valuable.>

"What's this memory stuff?" I asked. "You guys keep talking about buying memories. What's that all about?"

Guide looked surprised. I think. <You have never seen a memory show? Then that must be our first stop! It is the greatest of entertainments!>

"Obviously, you don't get the Super Bowl here," Marco said.

"We always suspected the Howlers might have collective memory," Erek said. "The Howlers may pass memory along, generation to generation."

<Yes, yes,> Guide agreed. <This is why they command such a price. Their memories are long and very clear.>

“Guide, have you seen these howler memories?” I asked him.

Guide laughed. <No. Not me. I am a Trader, a probationary member of the Guild of Traders. I am not interested in violence and killing and slaughter. No, it is the members of the Criminal Guild and the Warmaker Guild who buy Howler memories.>

I nodded. “We should check out this memory show thing.”

“We’re not here to sightsee,” Jake said, sounding frustrated. “We’re here to take down these howlers so that we can go home. They could be watching, ready to attack us at any moment.”

I crossed my arms. "It just seemed to me that if we have to have a battle, we'd be better off if we knew where we were and what was going on."

Jake didn’t have anything to say to that. "We need a place. A base of operations. We can't just stand out here in the open."

<Then come, follow me!> Guide said. <l know the right place.>

He started off, whining from his chest the whole way. We went down a set of steps, something the iskoort did literally backward, but with surprising agility and speed.

We came out on a new level, mostly dark blue, and utterly different from the previous level. Here we saw none of the ramshackle buildings of the higher level, only a vast field of small cylinders, maybe two feet tall.

<Energy storage,> Guide explained, and led us down another stairway, this one much longer. We stuck rigidly to the center of the stairs – from the top it was perhaps a half-mile drop to the mustard-colored floor below. Only Tobias was comfortable, flying around and beneath the stairway.

“Does this planet even have health and safety regulations?” David muttered, picking his way nervously down. “This has ‘dramatic fight with a supervillain on a high walkway’ all over it.”

<Oh man, don’t say that,> Tobias said. <I bet we’re going to have to do exactly that. That’s the exact sort of nonsense that would happen to people like us on a crazy lego planet like this.>

“What are you worried about?” David asked. “You’re the only one of us with wings!”

“Remember that time I told you we sometimes have to morph bird mid-fall?” I asked him grimly. “Have you been practicing your morphing?”

“Why did I vote to come here again?” David asked.

“Come on, babies,” Rachel said with a light laugh. She was skipping several steps ahead of the rest of us. She spun on one heel, leaned back and backsprung down several steps. David stared at her, stumbling over his own feet. Erek caught him before he could fall.

I looked between David and Rachel. Oh dear.

We walked out onto a level that, even from an alien culture light-years away, was instantly recogniseable.

“It’s the mall,” Rachel said. “A bazaar.”

<Yes, this is the level seventy-eight marketplace,> Guide confirmed. <We must move quickly here.>

"What? No shopping?" Rachel, of course.

We reached the floor and were instantly surrounded by jabbering, poking, pushing, whining iskoort, all desperate to buy whatever we had and sell us whatever we didn't. I’d thought the upper levels had been bad, but here, it was almost possible to make any forward progress at all.

"I see what you mean by moving quickly, Guide," I said.

<What? No, no, not for these honest Traders. But this market is a favorite gathering place for members of the Warmaker Guild.>

I had about three seconds to think _what?_ before something slammed me violently to the floor.


	8. Chapter 8

<This is why so few off-worlders venture into the inner districts,> Guide whined, making absolutely no effort to help as our group were kicked and punched violently by… somebody.

I rolled under someone’s feet, snatching a look at our attackers. There were only four of them, and they weren’t howlers. They looked somewhat like iskoort, but not the iskoort we’d seen so far; their bodies were stockier and more silent, their hands heavy and clublike. Their hooked toes were sharp, and the heads on their much shorter, stockier necks were boxy with thick, stubby horns.

I rolled to my feet, saw one of them make a grab for Tobias, and punched him solidly in the head. No impact – I’d missed! How had I missed? The warmaker iskoort weren’t exactly fast or nimble. I grabbed at his throat; my hands fit around it easily. Then I pulled him backwards, tripping him with one foot, and made to throw him to the floor. My hands spasmed and he slipped out of my grip at the last second.

“Stay still, you numbskulls!” Rachel shouted, frustrated, as she tried to punch a warmaker solidly in the chest.

<Are they using some kind of hologram or something?!> Tobias asked as he made a swipe for another’s eyes, missing.

The warmaker knocked be down again. I looked at David on the floor next to me. His nose was bleeding.

Erek calmly stepped over us, shielding us from blows with his legs. A warmaker kicked him, to absolutely no effect. He bent down, picked David and I up, one in each hand, held us high out of reach of the warmaker iskoort, and simply walked out of the battle. I was already morphing to osprey before we were out of the fray. David had the same idea, and was sprouting long golden eagle feathers.

Rachel, or course, was halfway to grizzly bear. She was having no more success as a bear than a human, but the warmakers’ kicks and punches had no effect on her. Erek returned to the battle to get Jake, who was on the floor cradling what looked like a severely broken leg, and Ax nimbly retreated behind him. I couldn’t see Marco.

The warmakers must have decided that the rest of us were boring, because they were concentrating their attack solely on Rachel, who bellowed in frustration.

<Get out of there, you lunatic!> Marco scolded her. <You can’t hit them.>

<Out of here how? So they can attack you?>

This was a good point. Jake and David were both still morphing. Ax was missing a stalk eye.

<Oh, for...> a squirrel dropped off a ludicrously wonky pillar onto a warmaker’s face. <I can’t even bite his nose! What’s going on?!>

Marco the squirrel was tossed aside. Ax caught him. There was plenty of room around us, now; the trader iskoort had all backed away several feet and were watching the battle with interest.

<We should all go,> David said, taking flight.

<We can’t just – > I started.

“I will hide her when you are all out of sight,” Erek said calmly.

We left. Ax was immediately swallowed by the crowd of traders; the rest of us did what we could to keep above their heads or dodge their feet, as morphs permitted. The noise of the battle was almost immediately drowned out by the noise of trading, and barely a minute had passed when three iskoort calmly walked up to us, two holding hands. The lonely one was Guide; the other two quickly revealed themselves to be Rachel and Erek as the hologram dropped.

<Guide, what was that?> Jake asked. <What just happened?>

“The Warmaker’s Guild can be aggressive,” Guide whined. “They are not known for their tolerance of off-worlders.”

“But why couldn’t we hit them?” Rachel growled. “It doesn’t matter how agile they are, I should’ve gotten at least a hit or two in!”

<That was nuts,> Marco agreed. <Those guys were wusses! They shouldn’t have been any trouble at all!>

“Why, because you are stronger?” Erek asked, raising his eyebrows. “Their strength and agility doesn’t matter. You couldn’t have hurt those iskoort any more than I could.”

<Why not?> I asked. <What’s going on?>

“This is a battle for their fates,” Erek said. “If harming iskoort were allowed, what do you think the howlers would do? Would they waste their time trying to hunt us down? The only way this fight can work is if the iskoort are off-limits until the winner is decided. Otherwise we would be in the middle of a genocide right now.”

<That’s hardly fair,> Jake said. <The howlers, yeah, but it’s not like we want to hurt the iskoort.>

“If you don’t want to hurt them, then why do you care whether you’re allowed to?” Erek asked. He sounded faintly amused.

“Yeah, yeah, we get it, welcome to your life,” Rachel muttered. “It would’ve been good to know this in advance.”

“Ellimist telling everyone the rules?” Erek asked drily. “That’s probably physically impossible.”

<Are you going to be like this for the whole mission?> I asked him.

He shrugged.

<Now that that nonsense is over,> Jake said, <Guide, can you get us somewhere to stay?>

<Of course. I had quarters negotiated while you had your exciting adventure. This way.> He lumbered off, away from the warmaker iskoort. We followed. <Incidentally, do you plan to sell your memories of the fight? With my brother, I can get you a good enough deal to cover the cost of residence.>

<How does that work?> Jake asked. <Would we forget them?>

Guide gave a whine that sounded like it could have been a laugh. <No. We merely make a copy, for others to enjoy.>

<No good,> Marco said. <If the yeerks get to this planet and see those? We’re toast. Everyone’s toast.>

<Hate to bring this up,> I said, <but can’t the yeerks just buy the memories of the dozens of spectators to the fight?>

Several seconds of silence followed this. “The ellimist told me that we were too far away from Earth for anything to affect Earth,” Rachel said. “How far have the yeerks spread? Ax?”

<I would estimate that – >

But Ax didn’t get a chance to finish. Because that’s when we spotted it. Over the sea of iskoort, a single alien, taller than us and loping through the marketplace on two bowed legs as if it didn’t have a care in the world, bright blue eyes lingering on shops as it passed.

A howler.


	9. Chapter 9

<Jake?> Rachel asked.

<Get down,> he said. <I don’t think it’s noticed us.>

<Eight against one,> Marco said. <We won’t get better odds than this.>

No information. No plan. But a chance to pick off one of our enemies ahead of time, get ahead of the game… Marco was right, there wouldn’t be better odds…

<Okay,> Jake said. <Battle morphs. But everyone stay out of sight until I say so. We want to use the element of surprise.>

We morphed. It wasn’t hard to stay out of sight as a leopard. Staying out of sight was what leopards did. A grizzly bear, gorilla, and andalite, though? Impossible.

The howler saw them. It looked past them. It showed absolutely no concern about us being there.

That wasn’t encouraging.

<Okay,> Jake said. <Tobias, altitude. Ax, take the lead. Guide, get back; this isn’t your fight. Erek, stay out of the way and keep an eye out for exits. We might need to retreat quickly if his friends all show up at once. Rachel, Marco, David; be ready to back up Ax. Cassie, you and I are on sneak attack duty.>

Somehow, we’d ended up near an edge of the giant platform. Iskoort traders, recognising an imminent fight, were moving out of the way. That was one less complication, although it gave Jake and I less sneaking room.

The howler was not large. It was about the size of a big man. Smaller than a hork-bajir, and looking a lot less deadly, although as iskoort moved out of the way I noticed that it was wearing a belt covered in all kinds of object that could only be weapons; blades, guns and heavy-looking orbs that might have been grenades, or something.

I tried to find a way to sneak around behind the Howler. Next to me, Erek was giving a constant stream of information. “The claws are sometimes coated with poison, but if it hasn’t been to earth, it might not know what will work on you. They prefer close-quarters, where they are deadlier; it’s best to stay out of their reach.”

Ax stepped forward, raising his tail, squaring his shoulders.

<Is he trying to duel it or something?!> Marco asked. <Idiot! don’t give it time to think!>

Ax’s tailblade whipped forward, neatly slicing off one of the howler’s hands. The howler reached for something on its belt as Ax pulled back out of arm’s reach.

“If it gets close enough it’ll use the needle teeth retracted into its upper jaw,” Erek was saying. “It’s not as fast as an andalite tail, but – ”

He was temporarily drowned out by the roar of a grizzly and Rachel, with David and Marco close behind, charged for the howler. Our iskoort audience retreated further, very quickly.

“ – gives it remarkable agility.”

The howler had… avoided damage, somehow. It wasn’t like with the warmaker iskoort, where the universe itself had forbidden us to succeed; the howler was just that physically flexible. A bear had swiped a heavy paw across its head, a blow that would have sent a human head rolling; the response from the howler had been for its jaw to slip sideways with the blow and then reseat itself and for its entire head and torso to rotate at the waist, like a lazy susan, preventing it from being knocked off-balance. This let it step nimbly out of the way of David’s clamping lion jaws. Marco grabbed it with a big gorilla fist and squeezed. It drew forward the claws on its remaining hand and sliced the bottom half of his arm off, like Wolverine. The gorilla arm fell away; the howler didn’t look injured.

It was the first attack it had made against us. It was like it wasn’t even trying.

But the action had spun it around to face Rachel, Marco and David, who were now on the other side of it. Jake and I were now behind it. Hidden.

<Ax, left,> Jake said. Ax moved around its left. <Cassie.> I darted in on the right and clamped my jaws around its spine.

“The hairs down its back are – ” Erek was shouting. But it was too late for the warning; I could feel the fine, brittle, hair-like needles slipping into my soft lips and gums and breaking off, their toxins sending waves of agony through my body. I did what a leopard does best; I held on, clamped down, even as I screamed in my mind. Chunks of spine, whatever the howler had instead of vertebrae, slipped apart under the pressure of my teeth. There was no crack, no crunch; I couldn’t feel anything break. Shouldn’t I be severing nerves, at least?

The howler’s secondary arms, which I’d completely forgotten about, shot down, hook-hands reaching for my eyes. I had no choice but to let go. Jake already had his jaws clamped around one shoulder; the howler raised its hand, holding the weapon it had taken from its belt earlier. A blade. Or more accurately, two blades, very close together. Like on those commercials that offer multi-bladed razors, but this thing wasn’t for hair.

The howler slashed at Jake with it, peeling a long strip of skin right off his body. Jake let go, roaring in pain. I wasn’t any better off; I had let go, but the howler’s hairs were still embedded in my flesh, still sending ripples of agony through my face with every movement.

“ – will paralyze and numb your senses,” Erek was saying. “If it needs to close in for a strike, it’ll throw a retractable – ”

<Erek, what was that about paralysing?> Jake asked as the howler, with agility I could barely comprehend, leapt straight up in the air and grabbed the roof above with it feet and secondary hook-hands. If my bite had done any damage whatsoever, it wasn’t enough to affect its movement.

“It’s why they’re called howlers,” Erek explained. “They can emit a sound specifically keyed to – ”

But the explanation was, once again, unnecessary. The howler had scuttled along the ceiling until all six of us in the battle were on one side of it. We rushed to keep up, putting ourselves all together into a neat little group.

The howler opened its mouth. And it showed us where it had gotten its name.

“KEEEEEE-row!”

It was a sound like nothing I’d ever heard. Instantly, every muscle and organ in my body felt like jelly. I couldn’t see more than a foot in front of my face. No, I could see, I just… the shapes and colours had no meaning. There was no sound but the howl, no physical sensation but an all-over painful static, like whole-body pins and needles. My vision swam, recovered, and I could make out a few images – Ax, thundering past with his hands over his ears, blood seeping between his fingers. Jake, tottering to his feet like me. The howler, opening its mouth again for another cry. Tobias, zooming along just under the roof towards the howler, claws out, striking….

“KEEEEE – ”

Tobias struck. The howler fell. It spun its upper body as it fell, drawing a gun, aiming for Tobias. It hit the ground neatly on both feet and fired.

<NO!> Rachel yelled, barrelling straight into the howler. She threw off its aim; the beam didn’t kill Tobias. It neatly sliced off one wing, leaving a long scar on the ceiling. Whatever the platform above was made of bubbled and melted under the heat, a few drops falling to the floor.

“Get back, Rachel!” Erek called. “Get back out of its reach!”

Rachel had no intention of retreating. She grabbed for the howler with both paws. It stepped between her arms and opened its mouth, unexpectedly long teeth shooting out of its upper jaw. It bit down into her chest.

“HHHHROOOOOWR!” Rachel bellowed in pain.

David had taken the opportunity to dart in behind the howler and pick up Tobias gently in his jaws. <This is the opposite of winning, guys,> he said as he pulled back. <We are not winning.>

<Tactical retreat,> Jake said urgently, <now. That goes for everyone. Erek, can you – ?>

Erek was already stepping forward, his hologram expanding. While the howler was distracted making a mess of Rachel’s chest, a small tribe of warmaker iskoort flashed into existence around the chee. We all dove in under the cover of the hologram, Marco hurriedly starting to demorph to fit.

<Rachel, back up now!> Jake commanded, making a leap for the howler’s face. He gripped the side of its head with his claws, mentally screamed as he discovered the same thing that I had about the white hairs, and held on while Rachel pulled back into the hologram and shrank. As soon as she was invisible, Jake let go and darted into the crowd of iskoort who were still, unbelievably, standing around to watch the show.

While the howler tried to spy Jake in the crowd, our holographic warmaker band walked in the opposite direction.

<Where’s Ax?> asked Tobias, who had been moved to Rachel’s arms instead of the rather untenable position of a lion’s mouth.

“I don’t know,” Rachel whispered. “I think I saw him running, and then...”

<The howler didn’t get him,> I said. <I’m sure he’s fine. We just need to regroup.>

I was sure Ax was safe. The howler hadn’t killed any of us; but then, we hadn’t taken down the howler, either.

A draw. Eight of us against one of them, and it had been a draw. Somehow, we needed to take down all eight. And I had absolutely no idea how that was going to be possible.


	10. Chapter 10

Regrouping, as it turned out, wasn’t hard. We didn’t have to go looking for anyone. Guide found us, and led us to a quiet, out-of-the way little room where we found Jake and Ax. For someone who’d rested in run-down shacks and shut-down shops and, when necessary, under the open sky in the middle of the woods, I always appreciated having a real place to stay on away-from-home missions, and the rooms he’d gotten us weren’t bad. There was a main room, a bathroom (at least, I think it was a bathroom; iskoort plumbing is weird), and a third room full of long crystal spikes that I couldn’t even guess the purpose of. Somebody had explained to Guide what a bed was, and there were five raised, cushioned platforms that vaguely approximated beds in the main room, along with a perch for Tobias and a cushioned area of floor for Ax. Erek, so far as I could see, hadn’t requested anything.

“That could probably have gone a lot better,” Marco said, dropping onto a bed.

“Uh-huh,” I agreed. I couldn’t answer properly because I was holding still so that Erek could pull hair-width needles out of my face. Erek was doing this for me and Jake at the same time, one hand per patient. Having to look closely at both of us at the same time did not appear to be causing him any difficulty.

“How so?” Erek asked.

“What, you think that went well?” Marco asked. “We got our butts kicked out there.”

“I didn’t say it went well. I’m trying to figure out how you expected it to go better.”

“Jesus, Erek, are you always this much of a downer?” David asked. He sounded shaken.

“No. And I’m sorry we didn’t get a chance to know each other under better circumstances, David. This has even less to do with you than the other Animorphs. It’s a pity that you have to be here.”

“Hey, I voted to be here,” David said, crossing his arms. “Although I’m beginning to see that was a pretty stupid decision. But the point is, we’re here now, and moping isn’t going to help. We need to figure out how to crush the enemy so we can save the day and go home.”

“I am not moping. I’m being realistic.” Erek peered closely at my face. “I think that’s all of them.” He turned his full attention to Jake’s arms.

“Is realistic going to get us out of here?” David asked. “No. Kicking butt is. If we pull our big boy socks up and actually deal with this, are we in more danger than if we sit around bemoaning the cruel fates?”

“Bemoaning the cruel fates?” Rachel asked, raising an eyebrow.

“David’s right,” Jake said. “This is what it is. We have to deal with it. So. What do we know?”

“Don’t touch their hair,” I said, rubbing my face.

<They’re packing serious firepower,> Tobias added.

“They’re almost impossible to hurt,” Marco said. “Ax took a hand off, but other than that...”

“Their claws and teeth can cut through anything,” Rachel added.

“And whatever happens, don’t let them howl,” David finished.

We all sat silently for several seconds.

“They are also excellent at engineering bioweapons,” Erek said. “It probably won’t come up, but I’d avoid letting them get their hands on any human tissue samples if you can.”

“Great,” Marco said. “This is just great. Why did we agree to this, again?”

“Because a planet’s on the line, and we’re supposed to be the good guys,” I sighed. That’s why we had to murder eight people.

I told myself that these were eight genocidal maniacs, hand-picked by the universe’s ultimate genocidal maniac. This wasn’t something I had the right to get pointlessly antsy about, not after all the genuinely innocent hosts I’d killed. This was the one, singular, clear-cut situation of ‘kill or be killed’.

All we had to do was find a way to make ‘kill’ possible.

“What else do you know about the howlers, Erek?” Jake asked.

He shrugged. “I’ve already told you most of what I know, at least as far as what they can do on the ground. We did not get a great deal of time to observe their behaviour.”

Jake nodded. “Guide? You saw the howlers before we got here. Notice anything?”

<No. I had not seen them before today. I know only that they came to Iskoort to trade memories for weapons and basa salts. They are very good customers.>

“Memories?” Rachel asked, perking up.

<Yes. Howler memories are very popular. Very clear, very long. And consistent.>

“We’ve long suspected that howlers might have a collective memory,” Erek said. “So they probably recall events that happened long before they were born.”

“Great,” David muttered. “So now all eight of them know first-hand how stupid we looked in that fight.”

<I thought that howler was playing with us!> Tobias said. <I guess that must be why! He was collecting information on us. On how we fight.>

But Marco had other ideas. “That’s it,” he said. “Howler memories. That’s our source of information.”

“This is a bad idea,” I said.

“You’ve got a better one?” Marco asked.

“We’re talking about a people who exist just to wipe out life. Do you want their memories in your head?”

Marco opened his mouth, but didn’t appear to have anything to say to that.

“I’ll do it,” Erek said. He looked to Guide. “Can your people sell memories in a format that an electronic brain can read, or does it need to be biological?”

Guide whined thoughtfully. <I see no reason why an audiovisual conversion could not be encoded with the appropriately detailed data. The issue would be whether we have any compatible format.>

Erek gave a little chuckle. “I’m sure I’ll be able to figure out how to read your preferred format.”

“This,” I said, “is an even worse idea. Erek, I thought you couldn’t forget things? At least we can recover from traumatic memories. You’re the absolute last person that should be doing this.”

“I thought you’d all decided that my role was ‘the information guy’,” Erek said. “I can parse this information for you.”

“No,” Jake said. “I can’t ask you to do that.”

“Then don’t ask. I told you from the beginning: I already intended to do this mission alone. I’m happy to tag along and protect you as much as I can, but there is no need for any of you to take permanent damage if it can possibly be helped.”

“But we’re supposed to let you damage yourself?” I asked, crossing my arms. “Just how long will you have to live with those memories, do you think?”

“Two or three days, probably. It’s hard to be sure without a better idea of howler strategy. Once I have the memories, I can give you a better estimate.”

“Why are you being so stubborn about this?” I snapped. “Look, I get that you’re upset. This is like the worst possible thing for you. Your creators’ killers are out there, you’re supposed to help us kill them to save an entire planet, and you can’t physically do a damn thing to hurt them. I can’t imagine how that feels. But I don’t understand why you’re treating this like a suicide mission. We’ve faced near-certain death before, and your moping is not helping. I know this is painful. I know this is about the worst scenario for you. But we’re here, our lives are on the line, a planet is on the line, so be sad if you must but please, please stop being an idiot.”

I became dimly aware that most of the team was staring at me. Marco gave a low whistle.

Erek just stood up, abruptly. “You’ve got it completely backwards,” he said quietly. “You really don’t understand.”

“Then explain it to me.”

“I don’t think I can. It’s comp – ”

“That’s the line you’re pulling? ‘It’s complicated’? Really? You think ‘you are but dim primitives with the lifespan of fireflies, oh caretakers of our dogs’ is going to work on us? We’ve been jerked around by that ellimist too much to fall for that nonsense any more. We’ve worked with the xenophobic andalite military playing their ‘we are so superior to you dim aliens’ games. You think your mighty robot brain overwhelms us? If you want us to understand, talk. If you want to stay quiet, stay out of our way. Pick one, because sitting around moaning about how you must accept every burden yourself and we will never understand why isn’t helping anyone.”

Erek watched me for a long moment.

“I didn’t intend to be a burden,” he said calmly. “If that is going to be an issue, then I will pursue our common goal separately.”

He started to leave. We all watched him go.

Everyone except David, who dashed over to block the doorway. ‘Uh-uh. No. I’m sick of people jerking me around. Ever since I found that damn blue box, everyone I’ve met except the hork-bajir have jerked me around, and that’s just because they’re too dumb to know how. The yeerks tried to use my parents against me as bargaining chips, and it’s only a matter of time before even that dimwit Visser tries to use them as hostages. These yahoos dragged me into an alien war and keep hiding information from me like they think I don’t know what they’re doing. I got dragged out in the middle of nowhere to watch people have nervous breakdowns over cannibal billionaires, an actual alien god showed up in my dreams all ‘hey, you should go risk your life for a planet of gibbering idiots who act like kids on drugs’, and now you’re pulling this garbage? I’m sick of being left out of things. Spill, _Memitor_.”

Erek could have removed David from the doorway and kept walking. But he didn’t. He stood back and crossed his arms, a glint in his holographic eyes.

“You want to know everything, do you? Would you like to know what that title means?”

David wasn’t going to be intimidated. He nodded.

Erek smiled. There was no humor in the smile. “All right,” he said. “I’ll tell you.”


	11. Chapter 11

“Chee live very, very long lives,” Erek said. “We have fairly tight-knit communities, no matter how far we spread out geographically, for obvious reasons. We have a method of communicating with each other instantly; kind of like your internet, but in our minds.” He tapped his temple. “The nickname we use for it, in English, is currently chee-net. It seemed funny at the time. We use it to communicate, to stay safe, to vote when we have to, and to share information. A chee can tell what they know to another chee. A chee lives many lives in their own body, behind a hologram – and many more, in their mind, through the eyes of other chee.

“But human lives are repetitive. This is not a negative; our old lives among the pemalites were repetitive, too. Who does not wish to repeat joy? And things do change, on the surface; new building techniques were invented, new revolutions in education and psychology and medicine, electricity was discovered, factories changed the social face of almost the entire planet. But by and large, a housewife in India in 1993 and a farmer supporting his family in Ireland in 1600 and a factory worker with two kids in China in 1960… the key notes are repetitious. There is joy and value in the experience. There is less joy and value in communicating the memories to a third party.

“So one of the greatest achievements one of my kind can have among our own little community is that of contributing something truly, genuinely new to the collective. A memory of something never experienced before, and likely never experienced again, at least not in the same way. These individuals are very rare, and are given the title of Memitor. The second most recent Memitor stood in Nagasaki when the atom bomb fell. The most recent was me.”

“What did you contribute?” David asked, entranced. I felt ice grip my heart. I knew what he’d contributed. Every Animorph except David knew.

We’d been there.

“Once upon a time,” Erek said in a singsong voice, “there was a chee, a nonviolent member of a race who had never known violence, borne of another race who had never known violence. He, like all of his kind, existed purely for the joy of experiencing life. Things had been difficult for the chee, because they had watched their home, their beloved creators, their siblings vanish in a genocidal onslaught that they could do nothing to prevent. Indeed, it would not have occurred to them to prevent it. The chee could no more consider fighting the howlers than the people of Pompeii would consider fighting a volcano. The pemalites, although not emotionally capable of violence, had seen it many times and recognised its function. The chee had not.

“The chee did what they could. What they had always done. They gathered their remaining people, and the remaining pemalites, and fled the disaster. It wasn’t enough; the howlers had released biochemical agents. The pemalites were dying, and there was nothing the remaining handfuls of chee could do about it.

“So they kept doing what they could. They found a new, safe planet to land. They found life there; so much beautiful, teeming life. They took their dying friends out into the sunshine and showed them the beauty of it and the pemalites cried with the sheer joy of being able to experience such a thing. The chee found some of that life, some of that beautiful, chaotic life that was similar, at least in appearance, to the pemalites, and they did the only thing they could – they infused it with the life, the spirit, the essence of their noble creators. And this is how they created dogs from wolves.

“The chee carried on doing what they had been made to do – they lived. They shared their joy with the world, and with their dogs. They had to hide who they were, because the strange natural disaster that had taken their home was endemic to their new world, and they did not understand it. They were afraid and disgusted, at first. But… they watched the dogs. They watched them form deep, true bonds with the apes of the planet, who stood out not necessarily for their amount of violence but for their sheer creativity in it; yet in the dogs they found gentle partners. Partners who would hunt and stalk and fight, also; they were made, after all, from wolves, and this tendency did not corrupt their joy, their loyalty, their gentleness. The chee watched the fragment of their dead home that they had brought with them become a part of their new home, and be accepted to such a degree that they were now a major force in the social order. And the chee became a part of their new home, too.

“Over time, disasters came and went. Whole civilisations were wiped out and replaced; by nature, by disease, by fighting. The chee had lived such sheltered lives among the pemalites. The pemalites themselves were wise; pemalites and chee shared most of the same edicts, but one edict that belonged to the pemalites alone was the commandment to spread life throughout the galaxy. The chee rarely got to properly see and experience a living, vibrant, resilient planet. And now they were a part of one. The death was necessary for the renewal. Even the death of the pemalites had brought renewal for the chee.

“And they lived. They observed. They played. Until one day, a new threat came from the sky. Not all-out annihilation, like the howlers. A subtler threat.

“At first, the chee weren’t particularly concerned. It wasn’t the first time aliens had come to earth. They did what they always did; they kept their natures hidden as they moved through the world, grieving forhuman friends who died, knowing they would be replaced by more joyful life. But the threat from the sky increased. It began to look like they would take over humanity entirely, if left unchecked. That the chee would lose their home again.

“What were they supposed to do? Just sit back and watch this, with the knowledge that there would be a new order in the yeerks, and that someday, they too would be replaced by something else? Were they supposed to simply let the last thread of the pemalites die when the yeerks found them unnecessary, or should they take them somewhere safe, away from the humans they had long co-evolved with to be dependent on each other? Should they flee the Earth, too? Should they stay and hope that things worked out?

“Chee are fundamentally stagnant creatures. Chee cannot reproduce. Chee rarely die. Chee do not change, they… accumulate. Of all the life and death and renewal happening on earth, the chee could not truly be part of it. It was never in their nature. They were built for a stable planet, after all; a stable ecosystem and social order. They just didn’t have the chaos within them.

“And facing this new threat, the chee faced their first real social schism, because a small minority of chee had started to wonder why this had to be the case. Their planet, their creators, were long dead. All they had left was a god that nobody trusted, some technology that had to be hidden, and themselves. Even what had been preserved of the pemalites had been fundamentally changed, altered; did the chee not deserve a future? Did the chee not deserve a chance to protect their own planet?

“Most of the chee wanted to hold on to what they were. They saw change, true fundamental change, as akin to death. They saw it as a deliberate betrayal of the pemalites. They wanted to hold onto what they had for as long as possible. Even if it was only a few more centuries. Even if it was only a few more years. Even if it ended with complete annihilation.

“The minority who disagreed did what they could. They tried to monitor yeerk activity, and disrupt what they could, although their inability to cause harm and the necessity for secrecy meant that there wasn’t much they could do. But one day, one of the spies learned something very concerning – the yeerks had stumbled upon an incredibly powerful pemalite supercomputer, and if they could learn how to use it, one of the most powerful forces of good in the galaxy would become a tool of oppression and enslavement. The spy had no way to liberate the computer. He had no idea what he should do. Should he try, and risk exposing the last of his race to be captured and disassembled for parts by the yeerks? Should he let things play out, and prepare to flee the planet, leaving it to its fate? His few spy friends had no more answers than he did, and the rest of the chee were no help whatsoever. Until… the answer to his problems quite literally fell out of the sky.” Erek glanced at Marco.

“And the thing about this computer, David, was that it was so incredibly powerful that in the right hands – hands who knew how to use it – it could reprogram the chee themselves. As soon as the chee got their hands on that computer, their inability to protect their home, to protect the other species that called it home, would no longer be a fundamental law of their existence. Suddenly, it became a choice. So this spy set up a meeting with the human resistance fighters, the Animorphs, he’d just found. And he asked them to help him help the world.”

“So… what went wrong?” David asked.

“A lot of things. But the mission was a success. The crystal was placed in his hands, and his new allies were dying, and he stood forward and made his choice; to cling to a dying past, or help those who needed his help now. It was so easy to save all of their lives. So easy.” Erek shook his head. There were holographic tears in his eyes.

“These hands can bend steel without effort,” he said, holding them out. “They can create an electrical current that could melt titanium. Hork-bajir flesh is nothing. For millennia, no chee could have held a hork-bajir arm tight enough to bruise it, but suddenly… there were no barriers. None.” He closed his eyes for a moment, taking a deep breath. Composing himself.

“And that is the first and only time a chee will ever experience such a thing,” he finished. “A completely unique memory. Worthy, on its own, for the title of Memitor.”

“I’m sorry, Erek,” I said quietly.

“But you can’t commit violence,” David said, sounding puzzled.

“I reverted the changes and surrendered the crystal to the Animorphs,” Erek said. “I don’t know what they did with it, and I don’t ever want to know. It’s better that it never touches my hands again. I think I proved pretty soundly that I can’t be trusted with that sort of thing.”

“It wasn’t your fault,” I said. “We would’ve died if you hadn’t used it.”

“You were only there because I was intending to use it,” he said.

“We would have had to take it off the yeerks anyway,” Jake pointed out.

“Yes, but I still intended to use it,” he said. “Right from the start. The… the intent matters, understand? Ever since that day, that single fatal mistake has completely dominated my life. I knew it would catch up to me eventually. I violated… well, I suppose you could say I committed the greatest possible sin for my kind. I honestly can’t think of a human taboo strong enough to compare it to. Of course he was offended.”

“He?” I asked. But Rachel got it.

“Oh my god,” she said. “That’s what’s up with you today? You think this whole scenario is some kind of… of divine punishment for your sins? Like this ellimist set this whole thing up just to creatively execute you for going against his rules?”

“I am sure he has other motivations,” Erek said. “It is hard to really predict his actions, but he usually seems to work to accomplish multiple goals at once. I’m sure this battle is here, over this planet, because Iskoort does fit into his plans somehow. I’m equally sure that the reason we’re here is because of that mission.”

“So he’s punishing you for being violent, and he’s punishing us for helping you?” Jake asked.

“Your god is the worst,” Marco commented.

Erek shook his head. “You did nothing wrong. He’s punishing me by killing you. Because I involved you.”

“That’s not even remotely fair,” David objected. “I wasn’t even there! This has nothing to do with me.”

“Since when do gods have to play fair?” Erek asked.

“Well,” Rachel said, getting up and brushing nonexistent dust off her leotard, “now I just want to win even more. Saving a planet, getting out of here alive, going home to protect our own families, that’s all really great stuff – but really, really pissing off the ellimist?” She grinned. “Now that’s motivation.”

“I don’t really get it,” David said. “When this ellimist guy came to me, he told me I was important for saving this planet. He showed me this big long universe-saving game he was playing with this other dude. Crayak. If there are planets on the line, why would he be wasting time messing with your head?”

“Because he’s a jerk,” Rachel said. “It’s what he does.”

<We don’t really know anything about him,> Tobias agreed. <Erek’s told us more about him in the past couple of hours than he’s ever said about himself, or at least more that makes sense. When he first came to us, he called himself an ellimist, played a member of a conservationalist species looking to preserve the wonders of the universe. Then he shows up and is all like ‘oh, this is just me and Crayak’. Then Erek comes along and says he creates new life and calls him Ellimist, like it’s his name. Is there one of these things, or many? Are they just called ellimists, or is he… something else, and that’s his name?>

Erek shrugged. “I don’t know. I don’t actually think he’d be able to answer that question. I don’t think things like that, separating individuals from groups from systems… I don’t know if they make sense on his level. He’s always just called himself Ellimist to us. As for messing with my head, with people’s heads… yes, that’s what he does. That’s what he _is_. Ellimist and Crayak have a big game to play with a very limited toolset. The more powerful they become, the more limited their toolset. Understand? They can’t use things for which they can predict an outcome perfectly, or there’s nothing to compete with. They can’t use things which are entirely random, beyond their predictions, or they’re trusting their chances to a slot machine. This is why they gamble with planets. And with people.”

I nodded, understanding. “People can be generally predicted, but not perfectly,” I said. “Not even for them?”

“Not even for them. It’s a game of ideals, Ellimist’s versus Crayak’s. And to play it, they break you open and test you. They pit every part of yourself against each other, uncovering inconsistencies, hypocrisies, forcing you to confront them just to see what you’ll do. Then they leave the remains, dead or alive, note the reaction, and move on. Ellimist will do it to you, too, if you live long enough. He probably already has, and you didn’t notice. When he came to me, when he offered me the chance to stand against the pemalites’ destructors like he was giving me some great prize, he promised me ‘You will have the tools you will need for victory.’ I assumed he’d remove my inhibition for violence; that that was the point. ‘If you think violence is so useful for defending a planet, have it. Go and be a bomb, a kamikaze pilot, save a world. Does this not make you happy? Is this not what you wanted?’ But he didn’t. I can’t hurt the howlers at all.”

<He sent you with us,> Tobias said. <The… tools you used for victory last time, I suppose, in his eyes.>

Erek nodded. “And constantly, since. How many times has a chee showed up at one of your homes with enough yeerk intelligence to send you to do our dirty work for us?”

“How many times has our planet been in danger and we didn’t know and a chee has done the dirty spywork for us?” I countered.

“This is all very interesting,” Marco said, “but not really the point. Ellimist is a jerk, Erek’s life is very sad, war is complicated and things beyond our knowledge are happening around us all the time. But the mission in front of us is to kill eight howlers. We’re wasting time right now when we should be working on killing eight howlers.”

Erek nodded. “These memories. I will purchase them and – ”

“Absolutely not,” David said. “We’re getting you through this and back home without a scratch on you, mentally or physically. That’s the new mission. That big blue guy can go screw himself.”

Erek looked baffled.

<You’ve been among humans for thousands of years, and this reaction surprises you?> Tobias asked. <So much for chee powers of observation.>


	12. Chapter 12

<Howler memories are expensive, due to their quality and clarity,> Guide explained. <You may not have the resources to purchase a full experience.>

“What do you mean, a full experience?” Marco asked.

<A memory puts you in the place of another, seeing through their eyes, feeling their feelings, even remembering their thoughts, sometimes. It is the greatest of entertainments. However for a… lighter experience, partial experiences can be purchased. Rather than implant the full memory into a mind, they can be converted to external sensory stimuli and shown that way.>

“Like a movie?” Marco asked. “Just vision and sound, that we watch rather than experiencing it as if we were there?”

<Yes, exactly.>

“That sounds a lot better, honestly,” I said.

The other Animorphs nodded in agreement.

<It is such an inferior experience,> Guide droned sadly.

“We’re not here for fun,” Jake said. “What would this cost us?”

<It depends on how many howler memories you wish to witness, and of what. My brother is an expert in this field. If you trade him your memories, he can provide you with an appropriate volume of howler data, to your specifications. It can be done when we trade memories for this room, all very quickly and easily.>

“I’m still not happy about that,” Marco said. “We have a lot of secrets that the yeerks can’t know. What if they, or one of their allies, get this information?”

“How far are we from Earth?” David asked.

<I do not know of Earth, or of these yeerks,> Guide droned. He headed into the crystal spike room and quickly returned with a long crystal spike. He put one hand on the base, and suddenly, the room was full of stars. <This is the location of our sun,> he said, indicating a small speck in the glittering field, which started glowing blue.

“Erek?” Jake asked.

Erek shrugged.

“Ax?”

Silence.

“Ax!”

<Hmm?> Ax was in the corner, staring at the wall. Staring with all four of his eyes. He never looked at anything with all four eyes. How long had he been there?

“Ax,” Jake repeated. “This is a star map. How far out do the yeerks go?”

Ax walked through the stars, eyes scanning with no indication of interest. He touched the crystal in Guide’s hand, causing the view to zoom out, and the number of stars in the room to double. He did this two more times.

<We are more than five hundred million light years from Earth,> he said. <Before the yeerks could spread a tenth of this distance they would have had to swallow not only Earth, but my planet as well.>

“Okay,” Jake said, “no problem on that front, then.”

“How does it… you know, work?” Rachel asked, looking wary. “Copying our memories?”

<We have interface devices for such a procedure. They work on approximately eighty per cent of off-worlders. For species with your general physiology, the success rate is almost one hundred per cent. We simply scan for the memories we want, copy them, and remove the device.>

“Is it… invasive?” I asked.

“Is aliens going through your memory invasive, she asks,” Marco said, raising an eyebrow.

“I meant physically.”

<We do require access to the brain,> Guide admitted. <For most species, this is not a problem, as there is usually some sort of access port in the skull, but for some species, a small hole may need to be drilled.>

“Not a problem for us,” Marco said. “We’ve healed way worse than little surgery holes.” But he didn’t look happy about it.

“Not necessary,” Erek said. “The human brain is easily accessible from behind the eyeball. If you’re gentle, you can access it without damaging any organs. It’s how they used to perform lobotomies; by sticking a screwdriver under the eye and shredding the brain matter behind it.”

“Thanks for that, Erek,” Rachel said, looking disgusted. “You’re such a wealth of information.”

“My father had the procedure done once,” he said, shrugging. “He was a wealthy widow at the time. A human was after her house and had her declared insane. It was extremely difficult to simulate the surgery, since no screwdriver can actually penetrate our bodies.” He tapped the metal under his hologram for emphasis.

“Oh, god,” David said. “Can we just get this super gross stuff over with before Erek says anything else?”

Jake nodded. “Okay, Guide, here’s the deal. One person does this memory thing, in exchange for this room and as much howler data as we can buy. This is a gesture on our part to verify if your tech works on us and to show you the quality of our memories, because man, have we seen a lot. After this, if the memories are good enough for you, we talk a longer term deal.”

“We do?” I asked.

“Is anyone not okay with Guide’s brother harvesting their memories?” Jake asked.

“I doubt that they have a procedure that would work on me,” Erek shrugged.

<Does it work on birds?> Tobias asked.

Guide eyed Tobias’ head critically. <You may need to change shape. But if you do, I do not see why it would not work, if the memories are copied into your new brain.>

<I have no idea if they are. But if it works, then have no problem with it,> Tobias said.

“Me neither,” I added.

Rachel, Marco and David looked a bit grossed out, but agreed.

“Ax?” Jake asked.

Ax was spacing out again. <Sorry, Prince Jake?>

“Come on, man. Focus. Memory harvesting. Are you up for it?”

<I will do whatever you wish me to do, Prince Jake.>

“Okay, good. But for now, just mine.”

<It should be me,> Tobias said.

“You don’t have to do that,” Jake said.

<We’re not certain whether it will work on me in human morph,> Tobias said reasonably. <I should go first and find out.>

“… I suppose,” Jake said, reluctantly. “Guide, take Tobias to do… whatever you need to do. Tobias, use your best judgement and try not to get ripped off too badly.”

“One thing,” Marco said. “Nobody’s allowed to sell these memories to howlers, okay? There’s no reason to make all this easy for them.”

Guide whined in that pitch that I was pretty sure constituted a laugh. <Howlers do not buy memories. They come to sell for weapons, but they do not buy any for themselves, not even from the Warmaker’s Guild.> He left with Tobias.

“Okay,” Jake said when they were gone. “Erek, take David and go scout the local area. I don’t like being reliant on Guide for knowing where everything is. The howlers are going to come looking for us here eventually; we need to know what our resources are, what our escape routes are. If you see any howlers, do NOT engage them, okay? Sneak away as best you can, and try not to lead them back here.”

“Hey, I’m not an idiot,” David said. Then he rushed to catch up to Erek, who was already leaving.

“Okay.” Jake said. He rubbed his temples. “Next big topic. Ax, what the hell is up with you today?”

<Prince Jake?>

“You’ve been staring at the wall since we got here and don’t seem to have heard a word anybody’s said since the fight. Are you hurt?”

<No, Prince Jake. I… I will endeavour to do better. I am yours, until my execution.> He bowed.

We all stared. Rachel’s head dropped slowly into her hands. “Is everyone secretly here on a suicide mission?” she mumbled into her palms. “Am I the only one who actually wants to do this and go home? Tell me now.”

“Ax,” Marco said, “what on this crazy cartoon lego planet are you talking about.”

<I fled the battlefield,> Ax said, tail and stalk eyes drooping. <I committed treason today. I dishonoured my Prince, and all of you, my cousins in battle. To abandon one’s own on the battlefield is akin to defection.>

“No it isn’t,” Rachel said.

“We’ve fled from plenty of battles before,” Jake said, frowning.

<We have retreated, when tactically necessary. Today I fled, in fear unbecoming of an _aristh_. I abandoned you all to that howler. I am here, because I understand that you may still have need for my skills on this mission. But I await your permission to kill myself, Prince Jake, when it is complete. >


	13. Chapter 13

I looked at Jake. I didn’t think it was possible to condense ‘I am so sick of sulking aliens’ into a single facial expression, but he managed it.

“Ax,” Jake said, “I’m not going to let you kill yourself.”

<I dishonoured – >

“In that chaos? Anyone would have run. Anyone.”

<You didn’t.>

“Oh, man, I shouldn’t have sent Erek away,” Jake muttered. Louder, he said, “These things, these howlers. They exist to destroy sentient races, right? And they have that howl that… well, we all felt it. I thought I was dying. I thought my brain was going to turn to liquid and run out my ears. You all know what I mean?”

We nodded.

“Worse than Nickelback,” Marco said.

Jake nodded. “We were all in morph. You weren’t.”

<I do not understand your point.>

“I’m saying that that was a… a physiological attack. That howl went straight for our nerves. Our brains. But none of us had proper sapient brains except you. If that howl attacks the brain, the actual physical grey matter, or whatever colour yours is, then it was targeted at what you were. You got it far worse than any of us. Being mad at you for that would be like… would be like being mad at people in bug morphs for getting poisoned by something a bird can fly through just fine.”

Ax didn’t look convinced. But he didn’t disagree, either.

Jake sighed. “Ax. We still need you. You said you’d stay with us for the rest of this mission, yes?”

<Yes, Prince Jake.>

“Then can we postpone this discussion until after we’ve destroyed the howlers? In the interest of time?”

<As you wish, Prince Jake.>

“I need you focused on this mission. Can you do that?”

Ax didn’t reply. But he gave an andalite salute with his tail.

“Okay. Thank you. Moving on… what do we have to work with in this fight? Aside from our normal morphing and healing.”

“Erek,” I said. “His holograms have already saved out butts a couple of times.”

“The iskoort,” Marco said. “They’re a pretty big advantage.”

“How?” Jake asked.

“The howlers can’t hurt them any more than we can. We can avoid this howl, or explosions, maybe even gunfire, by just staying inside groups of iskoort.”

“You want to use civilian shields?” I asked.

“I’m not saying we grab an old lady and put a gun to her head or anything,” Marco said. “They can’t be hurt. We don’t put them in any danger by hiding among them.”

Jake nodded. “Worth keeping in mind. Anything else?”

“We should go shopping,” Rachel said.

“Have you snapped?” Marco asked.

She sighed. “That howler was covered in fancy weapons, Marco. We arrived with nothing; where’d it get those? Guide said they’d been trading for weapons. We should do the same. Get some… something like a dracon beam for Ax, at the very least.”

Marco nodded. “Okay, yeah, that’s probably a good idea. But we don’t want to move around more than we have to. David’s got Erek with him, but if we’re spotted, we’ll start a battle way before we’re ready.”

“Not necessarily,” I said. “We just need to blend in.”

“Blend in? Here?”

I opened the door, gesturing at some iskoort who were walking past. “We just need the right morph.”


	14. Chapter 14

It wasn’t difficult at all to get permission from the trader iskoort to acquire their DNA. I sold two teeth for mine. Rachel got a better deal; she haggled her donor down to simply watching her morph into him, so that he could sell the memory as a novelty later. We left a note for the others, explaining where we’d gone, and headed out shopping in our new morphs.

The iskoort morph was… well, uncomfortable. The joints moved in ways I wasn’t familiar with, my own breathing annoyed me, and iskoort senses were, for some reason, distractingly sharp. I could make out every detail on every surface, hear every sound with clarity. The aesthetics of the design of the city, all bold colours and flat surfaces, made a lot more sense with iskoort sight – the shapes were both beautiful to look at and easy to navigate. The asymmetry didn’t bother the iskoort at all, and there was no reason for straight braces or safety rails – I knew where the edges of things were, why would I walk off them?

It was the instincts that unnerved me. Mostly, there were none. I’d morphed other intelligent species before and the instincts could sometimes be on the lighter side, but they were still there and noticeable. Morphing an iskoort gave me very little. At first I thought it was like morphing a human, that perhaps the instincts were too close to my own to notice them, but no, that wasn’t right; an iskoort mind wasn’t like a human mind. Iskoort weren’t great thinkers. It wasn’t that they weren’t intelligent; I’d been watching them moving about and conducting complicated trade deals all day. But the mind gave me nothing on its own. I had to prod and poke it to get what, in most morphs, would be automatic response.

And it felt… empty somehow. There was a hole inside, like… like being really hungry. Or possibly really lonely. Or blind. Something. A persistent feeling of something missing. I kept poking at the emptiness, like one pokes at a hole left by a missing tooth, but I couldn’t figure out what I was doing wrong.

This wasn’t, I decided, a morph that I liked very much.

In the jumble, the trader iskoort morph communicated only one clear urge to me: to trade. To collect value, and exchange it for greater value. Trading filled the hole a little bit.

And there were so many things to trade.

The marketplace was bustling. There was nothing confusing about the cacophony of calls and arguments; why would there be? I knew where the calls were coming from, who they were coming from. They were all separate conversations. Why would I confuse them? We found what we wanted easily.

<Weapons! Blanket grenades, gas bombs, _stelshraki_ blades! All delivered straight from Senatta! >

<Senatta blades are of inferior quality,> Guide said disdainfully, waddling up behind us. <This trader is attempting to target tourists or apprentices too foolish to purchase proper advice.>

<Oh, good, you’re back,> Jake said, not asking how Guide had found us. <How did it go?>

<Creepy,> Tobias said. He’d come to a similar conclusion as us, and had morphed Guide. <But no problems.>

<Such fascinating memories!> Guide said happily. <Such complex experiences from such a simple, primitive individual. Your colleague purchased many exciting audiovisual recordings of howler memories, although the viewing experience will be a pale shadow compared to buying the true memory. If the rest of you have similar experiences, you will have no trouble buying any weapon here that you might desire!>

<I’m glad you’re pleased, Guide, because here’s the deal. The rest of our group, except Erek of course, have some pretty similar experiences to Tobias, and all of those memories are yours… as soon as we defeat the howlers.>

Guide stopped breathing for several seconds, before resuming at a very fast, high-pitched whine. <All of them?>

<Yes.>

<As soon as you win this game against these howlers?>

<Yes. In exchange, you’re going to help us. You’re going to forward us anything we need, without asking for body parts and other nonsense in exchange, and you’re going to give us as much information as you can about what’s going on, no weaselling or negotiating or deception. Because if we die before we complete our mission, well.>

I saw exactly what Jake was doing. It fed right into my trader iskoort instincts. We were vastly overpaying for Guide’s service, and that was a good thing; it meant he would be completely committed to keeping us alive. The memory sale meant nothing to us. Our victory probably meant nothing to him; he didn’t seem to understand that his people were at stake. Highly asymmetric needs made for the perfect environment for the best deals. By overpaying by so much, we were making the deal of a lifetime.

Guide looked about ready to pass out. <Deal!> he said happily. <What do you need right now?>

<Weapons,> Jake said. <Find us whatever you think we’ll need to defeat the howlers. Take Erek; he probably knows more about what we can and can’t use than we do. Meet us back at the rooms when you’re done.>

<What are we going to be doing?> Rachel asked.

<We’re going to have a look at the data Tobias bought. I want to learn a little bit more about these howlers.>


	15. Chapter 15

We stood in a forest in shades of purple, blue-green, and mustard-yellow. We saw enormous leaves, as big as bedsheets. Vines wound along the ground, dipped in and out of the dark soil, then shot up to form strange trees.

Birds in long, random shapes like pink feather boas swooped and wove through the leaves and branches. Below them, orange-and-yellow centipedes crept along. Bristly combs rose from their backs, making them look like a comic cross between worms and stegosauruses. Animals like two-headed prairie dogs popped up out of subterranean lairs, spit out mouthfuls of dirt and disappeared again.

It was a rain forest. But someone else's. With wonders no more magical than those of Earth, but wonders just the same.

Through the forest came a column of creatures that made me laugh. "Gumby," I said.

They looked like Gumby. Not green, but dark blue, and not smooth, but as rough-textured as an old tree. But still they moved with the jerky grace of Gumby, walking on two legs, eyes raised to the treetops above them. I my hand moved into view and I jerked in surprise. A howler’s hand. We were watching this, of course, from a howler’s point of view.

It was lying in wait, hidden.

Then the nearest of the Gumby people spotted it. His eyes went wide. A smile twisted his strange mouth. He extended a hand toward the howler, welcoming, curious.

The column of Gumby people walked toward the howler like so many toddlers. Like kids who wanted to pet a dog or something.

The howler moved, a blur of speed. Other howlers came into view. They howled. To us the sound was softened, limited by the physical hardware of the iskoort projector. But it hit the victims full force. They began to blow apart. They stood there, helpless, confused, not knowing why anyone would hurt them, and they simply –

I closed my eyes at this point. I put my hands over my ears, too, but I couldn’t block the sounds out as well as the sights.

The display suddenly stopped. I peeked out between my fingers. Six Animorphs stood around me in the middle of our room, the humans all looking as nauseated as I felt. Ax’s expression was impassive, neutral. Tobias, of course, had the same fierce hawk expression that he always had.

“Tobias, how many of these do you have?” Jake asked.

<Seventeen attacks. It was all I could afford, but it wasn’t the entire catalogue. I asked specifically for footage of howler defeats, but they didn’t have any. In their long history, so far as I could find out, howlers have never lost a battle.>

“That’s not possible,” I said. “They… they have to lose sometimes, don’t they? Everyone loses sometimes.”

<You are thinking of natural beings,> Ax said. <Evolution requires failure to move forward. Things that evolve, fail. But these are a created people. Created by a being more powerful than any we have ever seen, for the express purpose of being the best at killing. They do not need to play by evolution’s rules.>

I imagined the howlers marching through the goofy platform city, paralysing iskoort with their howls, burning them with beam weapons. Perhaps they’d go to the very bottom levels and blow the supports, bringing whole towers down to crush the helpless inhabitants. Perhaps they’d march through, level by level, taking pleasure in cutting down each iskoort one by one. How did they feel, wiping out planets? Was it work? Was it play? Were they looking forward to taking us down and moving on to the iskoort? Were they apprehensive, afraid of what we might do to them, or did their perfect record of victories shield them from that sort of thing?

I was prevented from thinking about the issue too long by the door, which was blown clean out of its frame.

WHAM!

The door slammed against the opposite wall. In the doorway were three faces like tusked bulldogs made out of lava. Howlers!

“Morph!” Jake yelled.

No time. There would be no time.

Then Erek dropped out of nowhere, standing in the doorway. His hologram was down. He couldn’t hurt the howlers, but he shoved a hand through the metal on each side of the doorfame and hung on.

“Chee!” a howler said, sounding surprised. Erek’s only response was to plant his feet.

“No, not battle morphs!” Jake said. “Small! We have to get out of here!”

He was right; the odds were not in our favour. I stopped concentrating on the leopard. Cockroach? No, fly. Fly was faster.

A howler drew some kind of gun from his belt and shot Erek right in the chest. I winced. I knew that it was pretty hard to hurt a chee, but I’d seen Jenny hurt by Dracon fire before. There was no guarantee that Erek could withstand everything the howlers had.

This particular gun, however, did nothing. I kept shrinking.

“Fight me, chee,” the howler taunted, slicing across Erek’s arm with his claws. But a swipe that had earlier taken Marco’s arm off just left long gouges in Erek’s metal casing.

“This won’t last,” Erek warned us.

I was about a quarter of the way to fly by then. Most of us were. Except Ax, fully andalite, who was stepping forward, tail at the ready. <I will attempt to slow them down,> he said.

“No, Ax! Morph! We have to get out of here!” Rachel yelled.

<I ran once. Not again.>

<Not the time, Ax-man!> Tobias said. <Live now to fight later!>

<I am a servant of the People!> he said harshly. <I _will_ do my duty. Erek will not hold the door for long enough. > This was true; the howlers, apparently having deduced that Erek was too difficult to move, were already cutting the wall away around his hands. Soon there wouldn’t be anything left for him to grip.

< _Aristh_ Aximili-Esgarrouth-Isthill, you call me your Prince and you act like you mean it and I am giving you a direct order! Morph. Do. It. NOW! >

Ax began to shrink.

One of the howlers howled.

“KEEEEEE-row!”

The world swam. I was most of the way to fly, and the result wasn’t nearly as bad as it had been as a leopard, but the force shredded my wings and I dropped to the floor, flightless. The slower morphers screamed in my head.

The first howler dodged past Erek. Erek let go of his now-detached handholds and reached out to grab a howler’s arms. He held it there, steady, ignoring its taunts. I wasn’t surprised at his strength; I’d seen a chee restrain Rachel in grizzly morph before. But holding back one wasn’t going to help us much. The other seven could more than deal with us.

Ax still had his tail, although very little else of him was andalite. He struck at the first howler to enter, who was raising his blades over Ax’s changing form. But the howler was ready for the attack and a half-morphed tail wasn’t nearly as accurate; the howler dodged the blow, slicing its own claws down to cut a chunk off Ax.

Meanwhile, I was a flightless fly. My only hope was to demorph enough to remorph wings without being noticed. That meant I couldn’t grow. I had to be careful. A piece of assorted andalite and fly parts rolled past while Ax struck desperately with what was left of his tail, not to attack but simply to fend off the next strike.

I tried to concentrate. But there wasn’t time. We were going to lose. And then…

And then, the room was filled with a dizzying explosion of lights. There was no time to question it; I concentrated in demorphing and remorphing my back so that new, healthy fly wings sprouted, then got some altitude.

It was Guide! He was standing in the center of the room,crystal cone that projected the star chart held aloft. I wasn’t sure what he’d done to the settings, but the map spun, zoomed in and out, changed focus constantly, with various star systems being highlighted in different colours, filling the room with confusing, blinking, moving lights. It was enough to distract the howlers. One of them opened their mouth, started to howl…

Nothing.

They couldn’t do anything that would hurt Guide.

One of the howlers, not too quick on the update, leapt forward and tried to decapitated Guide with his claws. Guide shrank back, whining in fear, but the strike of course missed. A second strike sliced the cone in half. The stars disappeared.

Too late. The Animorphs were all already airborne.

“Where are they?” one of them asked, frustrated.

“Where is the chee?” another asked.

Erek had vanished. At least to howler vision. My fly eyes could see through his hologram as if it were just a thick haze in the air. Erek was projecting a hologram of the wall, about a foot in front of the actual wall, and standing calmly behind it.

I joined him.

<That was way too close,> Marco remarked as the howlers trashed the room for a bit and then left. <Too close.>

<Guide,> Jake said. <We need another place to stay. Can you – >

<Of course,> he wheezed. <I will negotiate more secure quarters immediately.> He didn’t sound too shaken by the experience. He sounded, if anything, delighted. I supposed he would probably sell his memories of the attack for a pretty penny later.

<Thanks for your help,> I told him. <You saved our butts back there.>

<Of course! I provide only the best services in helping off-worlders enjoy our beautiful city.>

<Oh, and be subtle!> Marco called after him as he left the building. <The howlers might follow you. Don’t lead them back to us!>

<That was the worst,> David said shakily. <I thought I was gonna die. I thought we were all gonna die.>

None of use responded. Nobody had anything positive to say.

If we didn’t find some way to turn the tables, and soon, we would die.


	16. Chapter 16

The sun was setting. Everyone was worn out. Guide had found us quarters with the Servant’s Guild, paid through a third party, and then sent a completely different iskoort to give us the address. Erek and David had learned enough of the local area to lead us there with no problems, where we were welcomed by yet another type of iskoort.

The servant iskoort were smaller than the traders or warmakers. They were also significantly less disgusting-looking, or -sounding for that matter. Their heads were covered in something short and dark that might have been fur and might have been feathers, with deep-set black eyes and small beaks. Their diaphragms hummed and purred, rather than whining. They wore more clothes than any other iskoort we’d seen. Instead of bright scraps across their chest and pelvis, each servant iskoort wore a neck-to-floor grey robe made of something like stiff silk and decorated with clay beads. Clay beads also ringed their long arms, wrapped around them on chords. I was pretty sure that the color, pattern and amount of beads declared their rank or job or something, but the system sounded far too complicated to be worth the time to even try to figure it out. They didn’t seem to care which servant we addressed for anything; we made a request to whoever was around, and they’d go and find whoever was responsible for doing that.

One thing you could say about the servant iskoort was that they liked requests. They were obsessively, slavishly devoted to obeying our every whim, and had many suggestions for things we might like. It was like being in the marketplace all over again, except nobody asked for memories or body parts.

It took a little while for them to understand that the only thing we wanted was a room. One with none of them in it. This wasn’t something they were happy about, but we were eventually able to convince them to leave and bring us something to eat in an hour or so. Figuring out what local food would delight us the most would keep them busy and out of our hair.

Guide, good old Guide, had apparently already explained some of our preferences to them, because beds were already set up in the room we were taken to. It also had windows. Windows that were currently occupied by blacked-out forcefields, but could be shut off at a moment’s notice to enable an escape. One overlooked the street a couple of stories below, the other was right at the edge of the platform, overlooking only a dizzying drop to nothingness, and presumably somewhere far below, the planet’s surface.

We sat on the beds.

“We weren’t able to buy any weapons before we saw the howlers heading for the old place,” Erek said. “Should I go and get some?” He sounded tired. Could chee get tired?

Jake shook his head. “I don’t think any of us should go out until the sun comes up. I’m pretty sure howlers can see in the dark or something. We need sleep. Two people on first watch, everyone else rest.”

“I’ll do it,” Erek said at the same time as Ax said, <I will take watch.>

Jake and I exchanged a look. Both of the sulky aliens on lookout?

“Me and Jake should do it,” I said, mentally scrambling for justification. “You guys have… uh...”

“You guys would interfere with their makeout time,” Marco said, coming to our rescue in the worst way possible. Jake glared at him. Marco made kissy faces. “Let Jake and Cassie take watch. It’s Cassie’s birthday.”

Erek wasn’t fooled. “I don’t require sleep,” he said. “And I can erect a hologram to hide us at a moment’s notice. I’m the obvious choice.”

<Andalites have superior wakefulness and superior eyesight to humans,> Ax added.

“Ax and I are on second shift,” Jake said after a moment’s thought. “Erek and Cassie are on first. Now. Sleep.”

The others went to bed and pretended to sleep. I sat next to the window, adjusting the settings so that I could see outside without anyone being able to see in, and watched. I watched the street below, the slowing trade as iskoort went home and other types of iskoort I hadn’t seen before, iskoort with night eyes and soft footsteps, replaced them. And I watched Erek.

Erek, the chee who couldn’t commit violence. Erek, the chee who we had sent out to buy weapons for us, and while he hadn’t had time to do so, he didn’t seem to have any physical incapability of doing so. Erek, who couldn’t move his own arm against an enemy but who had mobilised us against an enemy several times, knowing full well that we would probably hurt or kill people.

After I’d met the chee, I’d looked a bit into robotics. Most of the stuff was too technical for me to understand, but there was some good science fiction about what people thought a future with robots would be like. A writer called Asimov had come up with laws for robots, to make them safe in a society where they were servants for humans. There were three laws:

1\. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.

2\. A robot must obey orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.

3\. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

The laws didn’t apply to the chee, of course; the chee were not servants of their creators, and were never intended to be. They’d only really stuck out to me because of the emphasis on nonviolence. Erek wasn’t bound by his programming to accept anyone’s orders, that I knew of, and I had no reason to think he couldn’t commit suicide if he wanted to. Even the first law didn’t apply to him, not even if you removed the specification about ‘human beings’. Erek could allow people to come to harm. He could choose not to act to prevent violence. I knew this for a fact; I’d seen him do it, standing outside a battle, waiting for us to deliver the pemalite crystal to him. He’d watched us fight a howler that very morning, and done what he could to protect us, but made no move to help the howler. As for not injuring someone… where did you draw the line? Erek couldn’t injure someone by hitting them. He couldn’t injure someone by shooting them. He very much could injure someone by pointing them out to a bunch of guerilla fighters and saying, ‘There. He’s building something that can hurt the people you care about.’ He could, presumably, injure someone by providing a violent ally with weapons. He could injure someone by protecting a violent ally, whose express goal was to kill that person at a later date.

Asimov’s Laws didn’t apply to the chee, but what were the Pemalite’s Laws? The Ellimist’s Laws? Where, specifically, was the line that dictated Erek’s actions?

Erek thought that the ellimist… or Ellimist, if that was his name; I was going to have to correct the grammar on a lot of my notes if it was… had sent him, sent all of us, as some kind of twisted punishment for Erek for not following his rules. Forcing Erek to stand behind his previous actions in an absurd way, or whatever trickster god nonsense he thought was going on. But that didn’t make sense to me. The reprogramming, maybe, but how were we involved in that? If roundabout actions like getting us to commit violence for him counted as committing violence under the rules that Erek had been programmed under, then Erek shouldn’t have been capable of doing it in the first place. If Ellimist was going to take offense at the chee trying to survive in our world, then maybe he should have protected their original world a little better. That couldn’t be why we were involved. If it had been, David wouldn’t have been there. We had to be there because Ellimist wanted us to win. Thought we could win. He’d told Erek that he’d have the tools for victory, and then given him us; that HAD to be a message. There was a way through this battle. Some kind of… some kind of option he hadn’t spoon-fed us, like the thing with the human sanctuary off Earth.

Erek glanced at me, one brow raised; he’d caught me staring. I looked away, back to the window.

So what did we have? What ‘tools’ had we been sent with? Our powers and the clothes we had on our backs, of course. Our minds. We weren’t stronger, faster, or better equipped than the howlers… were we smarter than them? They’d survived countless battles, without any apparent losses; some of those species must have been smarter, better, more technologically advanced than humans or andalites. What quality did we have that was supposed to help us here?

Maybe… maybe _non_ -violence was the tool. None of us could hurt the iskoort, not for as long as any member of our team was alive. Was that the point? To just… drag the battle out forever? Chee could live for centuries. How long did howlers live?

Maybe that was it! Maybe it was a question of outlasting the enemy. Maybe we Animorphs were a sort of decoy, a token to make it look to Crayak like Ellimist had fielded an army. Maybe we were meant to die and Erek was just supposed to hide and wait for the howlers to die of old age. That would almost definitely work, unless howlers were as ageless as chee. Obviously, it wasn’t my preferred method of victory. But I’d pass the idea along to Erek later, when he was in the mood to talk; that way, even if the rest of us died in battle, he’d still be able to save the planet. If that happened, what message would he think Ellimist was sending him? ‘See how involvement ends badly? Stay peaceful, hide and observe; that’s all that’s left for you.’ Something like that, probably.

I hoped that wasn’t Ellimist’s master plan. I had no intention of dying light-years away from home if I could possibly help it. So: what did we have? A band of Animorphs who were… well, holding up amazingly well, under the circumstances. It was sort of a relief to have such a clear, unambiguous goal for once. There was no worry about innocents dying in the crossfire. There was no worry about secrecy or long-term risk and reward. There was no enemy-of-my-enemy, no live-to-fight-another-day, no are-we-any-better-than-them? There was us, there was an enemy, there was a planet to save. No option for mercy, no clever compromises. Not even I, at my most “tree-hugger peace-hippy”, as Marco would put it, could find much in the way of moral dilemmas that might trip us up. The only one facing any real difficulty with the situation, other than the obvious pants-wetting terror of near-certain death, was Ax. Ax, who couldn’t forgive himself for fleeing battle.

Some servant iskoort came by with food. I convinced them to leave quietly, pointing out that my teammates were sleeping, before I checked the tray. Giant, bright green cubes of… some kind of gelatinous… something. Eight of them. They were room temperature, so I figured I didn’t need to wake anyone to eat right away. I picked at mine. It didn’t taste too bad.

All around me, Animorphs got up to eat. Apparently nobody had been able to fall asleep. Erek didn’t eat, of course; neither did Ax, although he must have been hungry. I wasn’t sure if this was part of his depressive slump or if jello just wasn’t appetising all mushed up and absorbed through a hoof.

Maybe a good meal was all I needed. Was all any of us needed. As we ate, I began to relax.

Until Erek sat bolt upright. “You all have to leave!” he said. “Right now!”

“What’s – ”

“It’s poisonous gas! They’re gassing the room!”


	17. Chapter 17

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Eeeyup, this one's a two-parter! Come back next month to see how it's resolved!

“Flies,” Jake said.

“No!” said Erek. “Smaller morphs will die faster. The gas is a mixture of nitrogen, carbon monoxide, and several chemical agents that will paralyse an Earth nervous system.”

“Hork-bajir? Leeran?”

“Hork-bajir and andalites have the same nervous setup. I don’t know about Leerans.”

“A Leeran isn’t going to last three seconds against a howler,” Rachel said. “Telepathy is nice, but they’re wimps in combat.”

We were running out of time. Had to think. Morphs that didn’t need to breathe? Morphs that didn’t need nerves? Impossible.

I opened the window overlooking the street. A howler was on the other side, clinging to the wall. I closed it before it could climb in.

<Iskoort,> Tobias said suddenly. <The gas can’t hurt iskoort, right? Or they wouldn’t use it in here.>

“This is an isolated room,” Erek said. “I don’t know iskoort physiology, but there’s no reason that they – ”

Marco went white. “We have to get out of here right now! Cassie, open the window!”

“There’s a howler out – ”

“It’s better than what will happen to us if you don’t! Erek, can you put holes in the walls?”

Erek didn’t bother answering. He just started punching the walls. Turning the room into Swiss cheese. This was going to cost Guide a fortune.

I wasn’t sure how giving the howlers multiple ways to enter the room was helping our situation, but there was absolutely no time to ask questions.

“Everyone out!” Marco yelled, diving for the window. In his normal, human body.

The howler halfway through the window was knocked back. By sheer luck, it was the one Ax had removed a hand from earlier; it didn’t have any spare limbs to cut up Marco while still maintaining its grip. I didn’t see Marco land; had no time to go looking. I was dashing through the first hole I saw big enough to fit me, shrinking as I ran. Shrinking to squirrel size.

Jake hadn’t bothered waiting for Erek to make a hole big enough for him. He was swelling in size, his head scabbing over with thick natural plating. A rhino’s head. He charged straight for the wall, Ax directly behind him, ready to slice off any enemy limb that came anywhere near his Prince.

This was all going to cost Guide so, so much money.

Tobias and Rachel went for the window, Rachel not bothering to morph. A grizzly would hit the ground harder than a human and there simply wasn’t time to put wings on. David stood in the center of the room and yelled.

“Servants!” he shouted. “Help!”

With remarkable speed, servant iskoort poured seemingly out of nowhere. David pointed at the howlers. “They’re disturbing us!” he said. “They’re not paying customers, like we are! I want them gone!”

The howlers were immediately swamped by servant iskoort, alternately asking them politely to leave and trying to sell them services. It probably wouldn’t take long for the howlers to realise they could pay the servants to go away. But it would be long enough.

We ran.

Marco and Rachel were at the bottom of the building, halfway to their battle morphs, healing broken bones. But they weren’t alone. As we approached, so did someone else – two howlers, crawling down the edge of the building. The one missing a hand and another one, healthy, whole.

Tobias wheeled above the morphing pair, ready to hold off the two howlers for as long as he could. Which would probably be less than five seconds.

I was a squirrel. Jake was less than halfway to rhino. Behind us thundered Ax, one leg broken, a long cut down his flank that looked worryingly like the wound that had killed Prince Elfangor. David was behind him, trying to catch his breath, just starting to morph to lion.

Two howlers. Nobody ready to fight them. Their six friends wouldn’t be held up for long. If we fled… Rachel, Marco, and Ax wouldn’t make it. No way.

We had to buy them time. Find that magic window after our team had finished morphing, before the others showed up.

<Tobias,> I said, <can you lift a squirrel without killing it?>

Tobias understood my plan immediately. He swooped down, picked me up (I fought to control my squirrel brain, which promptly froze in panic), and dropped me right on a howler’s head.

Howlers are fast. So are squirrels. It reached up to swat me off; I scrabbled out of its reach. Avoiding the hairs down its back was the hard part. The skin was too tough for me to penetrate; I aimed for those bright, blue eyes, scratching and biting, and was rewarded with a shriek of pain.

It was the best sound I’d heard a howler make.

The other howler was bellowing in rage, wrestling with the large bird of prey that was clawing at his face.

It took about five seconds for the howlers to throw both of us off. I landed, a bloody heap of fur and bones, right on the edge of the platform, less than a foot from the drop. I instinctively froze. Tobias landed not far away.

<Cassie?!>

<Tobias?!>

<Fine, fine!>

<I’m alive!>

<Stay there,> Jake said. <Play dead. They’re ignoring you. You’re not fun anymore. Everyone with all their limbs and organs, get ready to lead them away before the others show up.>

<I can still fly,> Tobias said, taking off to prove it. He flew off the edge of the platform, out of reach, but ready to dive in and strike.

Both of the howlers were now blind. This didn’t seem to bother them as much as I’d hoped it would. Ax was still healing his injuries; Rachel and Marco weren’t fully morphed, but they were able to stand.

“RRROOOOAAAWHR!” Rachel bellowed, charging for the nearest howler. The one who had hurt Tobias.

<Rachel, no!> Jake yelled, but he, and everyone else, were already charging in to back her up.

<No?!> Rachel said. <We can’t keep running! Sooner or later our luck is going to run out! The only way to survive is to attack!>

She had a point. They were injured. And we were going to have to fight them sooner or later.

I started to demorph. _Quickly, quickly, no time to waste._

The team were having better luck against the injured howler than we had in our initial battle. Somebody had thought to cut its belt, sending various weapons scattering out of its reach. Now that it was blind, Jake, Marco, Rachel and David could just about hold against it. It was still dodging a lot of blows, somehow; howlers must have multiple ways of detecting where their enemies were.

They could hold their own against one, but the second was drawing a weapon from its belt. A long blade. I couldn’t shout a warning; I was too much Cassie, not enough squirrel. But the howler didn’t run to back up its teammate.

It came for me instead.

I struggled to stand on tiny squirrel legs as my flesh changed and shifted.

“TSEEEER!” Tobias swooped in; the howler was ready for him. It knocked him aside with a single blow. He dropped, unmoving.

The howler advanced. It stood over me. It raised its blade.

I raised my arm protectively. Like that was somehow going to do anything.

And then, Jake – Jake, mostly human but with a heavy rhino horn and forehead, slammed straight into the howler. It slid back – right off the edge of the platform. It scrabbled, grabbed for a hold. Not on the platform.

On Jake.

Together, they fell.

“JAAAAKE!” I screamed, reaching with a newly human arm, grabbing… missing. The pair were drifting away from the platform as they fell; there was nothing for them to grab on but each other, and the cries of my allies rang in my head as I watched Jake demorph, the howler concentrated singularly on slicing him up as they both fell to their doom. Jake was remorphing; I couldn’t see what he was becoming, things were moving too fast, but almost immediately, his voice was in our heads.

<Get everyone out,> he said. <It’s okay. Just complete the mission. Save each other; save – >

His voice cut out. I felt nausea welling within me. It wasn’t unusual for us to lose thought-speak contact in a battle; people drifted out of range or became distracted or passed out. But this was accompanied by a sensation I’d felt once before. An undeniable, unmistakeable sensation that told you exactly what had happened to the person you were talking to.

I’d felt it when Prince Elfangor, while projecting courage to the Animorphs to keep us calm and steel us for the war ahead, had been eaten alive by Visser Three. It was the sensation of somebody dying in your mind.

Jake was dead.


End file.
